Summary
Shelter is an aggressively mediocre action movie that seems determined to be as bland as possible at every turn, wasting a solid cast on material undeserving of their talents.
I’ve argued in favour of typecasting before, and Jason Statham is one of my go-to examples of actors who do one thing well enough that I’m not interested in seeing them do anything else. A Statham romantic comedy? Miss me with that. But if you’re in the market for a ruggedly handsome bald man who kicks people a lot, he’s your guy. Unsurprisingly, then, in Shelter, he’s a ruggedly handsome bald man who kicks people a lot, but the movie itself feels like an exercise in how sleepy an action vehicle can be without crashing devastatingly into a bollard.
Shelter’s problem isn’t that it’s generic – that’s the Statham wheelhouse. Its problem is that it’s painfully generic, average across the board to a degree that it doesn’t do a single thing with more than the bare minimum degree of competency. The cliches are baked in at a fundamental level and then piled on like a suffering Jenga tower, never amounting to anything beyond a rote procession of ideas worn threadbare by their use in a thousand other movies just like this one. An action star of Statham’s vintage deserves a bit better that what Ric Roman Waugh (Greenland 2: Migration) has provided him with here.
Statham (Fast X) plays the pleasingly alliterative Michael Mason, a former all-action soldier who now spends his days living an extremely reclusive life on a small island in the Outer Hebrides. He sees nobody except his old Army buddy, who is credited only as “Uncle” (Michael Schaeffer), and Uncle’s niece, Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach, an admittedly interesting talent), who occasionally drops off supplies at his doorstep. Jessie’s character consists exclusively of “Uncle dies”, so she begins to look to Mason for protection almost immediately after meeting him, but the past he’s obviously hiding from means that he’ll be forced to protect her not just from a life without male role models but from highly-trained MI6 agents who keep trying to kill her on account of her new association with him.
This is all to do with a – all together now – ethically questionable government surveillance program dubbed T.H.E.A., which is spearheaded by career spy Steven Manafort (Bill Nighy, Harlan Coben’s Lazarus) and works how surveillance systems in movies like this always do, which is to say by magic. Mason’s mug is spotted out and about and, because the system has been programmed to mistakenly identify him as a terrorist for reasons that are revealed later, an MI6 death squad is sent to his lighthouse to take him out. Cue a lot of kicking and punching and a breathless cross-country chase as Mason tries to get Jessie to safety while being pursued by a nigh-unstoppable super-assassin named Workman (stuntman Bryan Vigier).
In amongst all this there are small parts for Naomi Ackie (The Thursday Murder Club) as Roberta Frost, whose job is to stare at T.H.E.A.’s innumerable monitors, and Daniel Mays (A Thousand Blows) as one of Mason’s convenient allies, Booth. Both actors, like Nighy and the great Harriet Walter, who’s in a single scene, are completely wasted on plot-relevant info-dumps that sneak in between action scenes, which are themselves only passable. Statham does his very best – his physical capabilities do a lot of heavy lifting – but he’s playing the idea of a character rather than a fully-formed one, and Mason’s unexplored quirks don’t play to his strengths. Sequences where he might be allowed to emote a little are sped by with alarming obviousness, which feels like a shame since this kind of world-weary tough guy shtick is what he’s best at.
If there’s a genre other than romantic comedy where adhering to a familiar formula is largely part of the fun, then action is that genre. It can’t be overstated, then, how bland Shelter has to be for its familiarity to feel this wearying. The precious few moments of novelty in the fight choreography are buried under slapdash editing, which seems to actively work against Statham’s ability to perform most of the stunts himself. It’s rare, even in an endlessly expanding catalogue of mediocre action movies, for one to feel so resolutely determined to be as bland as possible. In that respect, at least, Shelter is a resounding success.
