Director: Ric Roman Waugh
Writer: Ward Parry
Stars: Jason Statham, Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Bill Nighy, Naomi Ackie
Synopsis: Mason lives in recluse at a remote setting by the sea. When he chooses to rescue a young girl from drowning in a terrible storm, he unwittingly sets off a chain reaction that soon brings violence his way, forcing him to confront choices from his past.
It might be a bit of hyperbole to describe Jason Statham as an enigma, but he’s been on a steady path over the past few decades as an action star and franchise regular with Fast and Furious and The Meg. In terms of standalone films, Statham has essentially made a brand of himself playing what seems to be the same loner character with a hidden past as an assassin in nearly every recent film of his, and they’ve had an extremely varied success rate over the years. For every bland boiler plate action flick that only barely gets the job done there’s a genuine one that seems to roll with its absurdity like The Beekeeper or the two Crank films; unfortunately this time around Shelter is one of the most generic Statham releases in recent memory.
The plights of the film are somewhat saved by some solid action choreography amidst the occasional shoddy visual effects, but Shelter’s central flaw is its lack of anything meaningful emotionally. The film clearly wants its audience to take the central relationship of our two main characters, Michael and Jesse, seriously as the movie’s core, and it’s hard when we are rarely given any reason to care about either of them besides the broadest of strokes. Simple narratives and beat ’em up action is never a bad thing, especially with a star like Statham at the lead, but Shelter is a largely dull affair that will evaporate from your consciousness as soon as the credits roll.
We start the film with Michael Mason (Statham), a lonely man residing on an island that’s off-grid from the world except for the occasional times when he gets supply drop-offs from Jesse (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), a girl who is perplexed by the mysterious man as she delivers essentials to him week by week. After an incident where Jesse’s uncle topples his boat in the middle of a storm, Mason sees it from afar and decides to save Jesse and care for her as she recovers. While stepping foot off the island for the first time in years to gather medical aid for Jesse, a camera catches Michael, and we learn that he was a former MI6 Assassin who spared an innocent life and went against orders, leading to him being completely disowned by the agency.
Now knowing where he’s located, Michael’s former commander, Manafort (Bill Nighy), has started a resilient hunt to finish him and Jesse off, tying up all the loose ends he left behind years ago. With an assassin now tracking them and Jesse growing attached to him, Michael must protect her at all costs and finally bury his past.
If there’s one aspect of Shelter that keeps it from being even more unmemorable, it’d be that director Ric Roman Waugh is pretty solid at staging most of his action here. There’s never a scene that’s truly incredible or anything, but it’s clear Waugh knows how to format the choreography in pleasing ways. It mainly shines in scenes of hand-to-hand combat where the physicality from Statham is greatly appreciated. There’s a tight flow to watching him mow down goons that will satisfy genre fans that just want some quick fights, even without much pizazz to them; the issues lie in the repetitive structure at hand and the overly serious tone the film never earns.
The connection between Jesse and Michael is where the film wants to bring in emotion and resonance with the leads, and it simply just isn’t compelling in the slightest. The drama between the two of them and how they relate to each other is either incredibly predictable or just too repetitive to ever leave any impact. Many times when the action stops, it just feels like they have the same conversations over and over. Statham even looks bored in a few scenes.
That’s without even mentioning characters that would be completely inconsequential if their sections were removed entirely from the film, like Naomi Ackie’s intelligence unit character, who is completely underutilized here. These issues would be less of a problem if the film’s tone was just lighter and had a little more fun with itself, but the grittiness of the story works for and against the film, and the lack of substance is often more of a hindrance.
If you’re looking for the most basic of action thrills, then Shelter will provide on that front, but it does little of anything else on any level besides being average. Despite the film’s solid action, it never rises above being middling due to its generic character beats that make any seriousness or emotions that the film wants to convey feel unearned. It’s about on par with a TNT classic dad movie you’d watch on cable TV, but unfortunately, in a derogatory sense.
