Flasz On Film

Synopsis: Former government assassin Michael Mason’s (Jason Statham) isolated existence on a remote Scottish island is disrupted when he rescues a young girl named Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), inadvertently drawing the attention of his former agency who dispatch operatives to eliminate him. Forced to flee together across Britain, the unlikely pair must survive relentless pursuit as Mason confronts the deadly consequences of his past.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, especially to those lucky few who read my stuff, the winter doldrums are the natural habitat for canonical “dad movies” and one of those rare occasions to sight Gerard Butler, Liam Neeson or Jason Statham on the big screen. And Ric Roman Waugh doesn’t need to be told twice that this is the time to strike as he’s back in cinemas with a double strike of Greenland 2: Migration (which follows up the events of his own directorial effort Greenland) and this—Shelter. And while I didn’t have the opportunity to see yet how Gerard Butler’s family is supposed to survive a comet-induced apocalypse and I can only rely on the rather poor word of mouth coming from across the pond, I can tell you that at least one of his movies is worth checking out. Though, you must calibrate your expectations before you do so.

After all, Shelter fulfills nearly all necessary criteria to qualify as an out-and-out action thriller for middle-aged dads. Sparse in back story and wholly reliant on simple and character-driven plotting that also isn’t at all original, this movie has one job to do. And its job is to put the viewer in a sufficiently competent state of suspension of disbelief to make sure they’d enjoy the time spent following Jason Statham’s brooding sigma-type ex-assassin as he embarks on a one-person vendetta against rogue MI6 elements. What you won’t get here is an attempt at a John Wick-esque slickness, nor will you be subjected to Greengrass-esque levels of on-the-ground immediacy. You will, however, experience an approximation thereof.

Naysayers might dismiss Shelter as John Wick from Temu or The Bourne Ultimatum you have at home and there might be a grain of truth in their assertions. There’s absolutely zero originality in what this movie attempts to do, which is nothing more than a string of well-worn action genre tropes held together by genre familiarity, scotch tape and good intentions. What it does, however, is execute on those tropes exceedingly well. For the most part, the story has very little fat on its meat and only over time its ludicrous conceit—which involves government surveillance and magic as far as I can tell—is allowed to marginally spoil the experience of watching it. Statham, much like your typical action hero, speaks very little and whenever he does open his mouth, genre clichés march out of it in formation. He lives exactly how you’d imagine John Rambo would if he had to hide from his former handlers—on an island in the middle of nowhere, with a loyal dog companion. The only reason why we hear him speak and see him do things is because he must take care of a young girl. Standard stuff.

But I have to admit that this “standard stuff” is still incredibly watchable. Perhaps, a lot of the film’s watchability is owed to the chemistry shared between Statham and Bodhi Rae Breathnach (who has recently been in Hamnet), as the entire dramatic weight of the experience rests on their frail relationship; a fundamental gamble that the audience will have no other choice but to get invested in their plight and follow them as they seek… shelter, all while deadly baddies descend upon them in waves. Again—standard stuff.

Sure, I have seen it all before… but by the same token I have had a burger before. I love burgers and sometimes it’s just OK to have one. I don’t need it to break any new ground or reinvent the wheel. Sometimes, a well-cooked and properly built burger where the beef patty tastes like it should, the bun is where needs to be and all the classical condiments are present too is exactly what I need to see my spirits lifted. That’s what Shelter is—just a competent movie burger. Or, coming back to that analogy from two paragraphs back, it might be John Wick from Temu or a Bourne movie you have at home. But so what? It does rarely happen that an item purchased on Temu works as described and a Jason Bourne you have at home is still perfectly serviceable.

Filled with viscerally filmed chases and anchored around a handful of key action sequences—one of which looks immediately inspired by the nightclub shootout in John Wick Chapter 4—Shelter is just a fun movie to watch. Even though you will always know that you have seen it all before, just witnessing Statham in a scrappy, Bourne-esque fight where kitchen utensils are in play is enough to bring a smile to your face. At the same time, you can rarely go wrong if you film a car chase from a Greengrass-meets-Frankenheimer passenger perspective. It’s just stuff that works, especially when the filmmakers know what they’re doing and they have done this before a number of times.

Therefore, while it is all a conglomeration of tropes and ideas magpied from all over the genre wrapped around a narrative you will most assuredly forget by the time you come back home, Shelter is still a competent throwback of the kind I simply require for cinemas to show at this time of year. Sometimes seeing Jason Statham (or any other of the third-wave action heroes for that matter) in a predictably-engineered setting is just what’s needed to remind you that solid action movies are just like those middle-aged dads who go out to watch them: unassuming, perfectly invisible in the crowd of attention-seekers, and importantly, good at their jobs. And they know it.