by Chris Bakker, Contributing Writer
After The Beekeeper and A Working Man, Shelter marks the third year in a row where we are treated to a Jason Statham action movie. Breaking the tradition, rather the direction of David Ayer, this time, Ric Roman Waugh is behind the camera, who also released his Greenland sequel this month as well.
In terms of quality, Shelter falls somewhere between Statham’s two previous outings, though as you might expect it shares a couple of touchstones with both of them. Gone are the days of going through life as a humble beekeeper or construction worker: this time Statham counts the days as the keeper of an old, inactive lighthouse somewhere on the Outer Hebrides, an island chain off the coast of Scotland. This quiet life, which he shares with his dog whilst waiting for weekly deliveries from the mainland, is disturbed when a storm hits the ship a man and a young girl use to make these deliveries. The man is killed, and his niece Jessie is injured. In order to help her, Statham must make a run to the mainland for medication. While there, he is spotted by MI6 through surveillance of a random video call, and the entire circus surrounding Statham’s inevitable ‘man with a past’ plot is underway.
As familiar as we are with the premise of a former military man whose had a falling out with their former employers, for one reason or another, there are very few ways to be inventive with this genre. Shelter doesn’t really do much to even make the attempt, and as such, comparisons to other movies, particularly the Bourne franchise, are easily made. But Shelter does do one thing that’s exceedingly in its favor as a movie unto itself: its setting. Putting Statham on a minuscule island that doesn’t have space for much more than a home, a lighthouse, and a boathouse, forces the movie to at least take its time to rev up. The early stages where he’s simply looking to avoid taking any sort of action allows for his young co-star Bodhi Rae Breathnach (fresh off her role in Hamnet) to be the center of any emotional investment into this story.
Even as the movie gets well and truly underway in becoming a Jason Statham action movie, the way it gets there is through the Scottish countryside. There’s much that can be said about that beautiful part of the world, but ‘densely populated’ is not one of them. As a result, both the tension and the action are confined and feel intimate as a result. There’s just something about a car chase across those mostly dirt roads on narrow paths between drystone walls, as opposed to weaving through traffic on city streets that we’ve all seen a hundred times.
Unfortunately, as Shelter goes on and wants to ramp up everything from its tension to its action, it loses sight of that intimacy and the quiet, rural feeling. It escalates its government conspiracy to the point where most dialogue just becomes about revealing things to the audience instead of informing on character, it moves Statham and Breathnach continuously closer to population centers, and there are more and more faceless bad guys for Statham to dispatch. As a result, what starts as a solid, tense thriller with clearly defined characters and goals becomes a muddled action movie that has to tie up loose ends as it creates them on the spot just in order to have somewhere to go. If you’re looking for another Jason Statham action movie, there’s a couple lulls waiting for you here, but if you were looking for something a bit more dialed back and patient, you’ll have to settle for the first half.
Rating: It’s Just Okay
Shelter is currently playing in theaters
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