We don’t have many stars like Jason Statham left. If the ‘80s gave us a plethora of iconic tough guys, the ensuing decades have whittled them away via changes in social norms and the relentless march of time — indeed, there’s a certain sociological interest in witnessing the various ways that Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Van Damme, et al. have chosen to navigate their late-careers. Tom Cruise may be “the last movie star,” but he was never an action guy in the truest sense of the phrase. Even Keanu, with The Matrix and now John Wick franchises securing his place in the action history books, is more of an actor than Statham. Stern, stolid, often monosyllabic, and with a physique carved out of granite, Statham doesn’t act so much as simply exist, allowing things to be enacted around and upon him. More accurately, he’s a re-actor, the center of the universe, and in this (admittedly limited) sense, he is one of our last action heroes. To call Shelter formulaic or cliché, then, is to miss the point; it is both of those things, but within the parameters of Statham’s whole project, it is also a sterling example of his virtues. Put simply: it’s a good movie, if this is your sort of thing. To paraphrase Michel Mourlet, Jason Statham is an axiom, his presence in any film being enough to instill beauty, and he brings something not even the worst of directors can debase.
Thankfully, Ric Roman Waugh is not the worst of directors. While Jesse V. Johnson, James Nunn, and William Kaufman work in the DTV margins, doing a lot with a little outside of the mainstream, Waugh is one of the only guys getting a decent budget to make these mid-level theatrical releases. Waugh’s collaborations with Gerard Butler (Angel Has Fallen, Kandahar, Greenlands 1 and 2) are all varying degrees of “good,” but branching out and working with Statham brings a very different energy to the proceedings. Waugh brings out the warmth in Butler, but here accentuates Statham’s aloof otherness. To wit, when we first meet Michael Mason (Statham), he’s living alone on a tiny island with a non-functioning lighthouse. He sits with his dog, plays chess against himself, and drinks. It’s a quiet life, hushed silences interrupted only by the crashing waves of the surrounding sea. Occasionally, a fishing boat makes a supply trip, a young lady named Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and her uncle delivering boxes of food and liquor to the front door. She’s curious about the strange hermit that lives here, but her attempts at speaking to Mason are rebuffed.
On one such trip, however, a freak storm sinks the fishing boat, killing Jessie’s uncle and injuring her in the process. Mason swims to the rescue, brings Jessie inside, and begins tending to her wounds. Their relationship is standoffish at first, but as luck would have it (and as cliché demands), Mason begins to thaw toward his new housemate. When infection begins to set in on Jesse’s ankle, Mason makes a trip to the mainland to fetch antibiotics. But no sooner has he re-entered civilization than a high-tech British surveillance algorithm detects his face via a passing cell phone selfie. Alerts go off somewhere, and the entire military industrial complex immediately sets out to erase Mason from existence. Would you believe that he’s a former special-ops soldier, and that his continued existence implicates powerful higher-ups who are conducting espionage against their own citizens under the flimsy guise of our post-war on terror panopticon? Of course you would; there are a million movies like this. Mason’s old handler is Manafort (Bill Nighy, classing up the joint), who is introduced while being fired from MI6 by the Prime Minister after their illegal surveillance system has been revealed, while simultaneously being given free rein to play spy master in an unofficial capacity, unencumbered by any oversight. Manafort hijacks his own agency’s communication channels so as to order a hit on Mason and Jessie, sending Workman (French stuntman Bryan Vigier, doing excellent work here) on a collision course with his targets.
Nothing that follows will surprise anyone, and its familiarity is part of the film’s low-key charm. There’s a little Man on Fire here, as well as Statham’s own Safe, and certainly a lot of Bourne. But as the saying goes, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Everyone hits the expected beats with enthusiasm and aplomb, and Waugh orchestrates the proceedings with a sleek, no-fuss professionalism. Cinematographer Martin Ahlgren, who also photographed Greenland 2, films gray, dull skies that don’t descend into murky sludge, and any streaming sheen is mercifully absent. The fights are quick and brutal, smartly choreographed and shot with clean precision. If these all seem like minor virtues, they’re not unimportant ones, given the state of our flattened action film landscape. That doesn’t mean there’s a high ceiling here, but sometimes a three-star movie just hits the spot as well as anything can.
DIRECTOR: Ric Roman Waugh; CAST: Jason Statham, Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Naomi Ackie, Billy Nighy; DISTRIBUTOR: Black Bear; IN THEATERS: January 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 47 min.
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