Jason Statham Is the King of January Movies, and 'Shelter' Proves It
If you know us, you know we love Jason Statham. And it just wouldn't be January without a dose of Statham's patented ultraviolence. The latest installment in the Transporter star’s (basically identical) oeuvré is Shelter, directed by Ric Roman Waugh. Waugh is the filmmaker behind a litany of better-than-they-should-be Gerard Butler movies, like Angel Has Fallen (2019), Kandahar (2023). (He also helmed the total bum-out that is Greenland 2 (2026), which is still haunting the corridors of a very few North American cinemas.)
Statham Plays a Retired Assassin...Again
As always, the Stathe plays a former mercenary-assassin living in semi-peaceful exile. This time, it’s a small Scottish isle on which a dreadful storm rages. During the chaos, Mason (Statham) rescues a pre-teen girl, Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), from certain death as her uncle sinks to a watery doom in his trawler. Unfortunately, Mason’s act of heroism puts him back on the grid and in the crosshairs of MI6, represented here by an evil Bill Nighy and a bland (through no fault of her own) Naomi Ackie. That means they’re going to send everyone they have to terminate Mason, who will have to use his particular set of skills to dispatch all of them with increasingly inventive methods. By boulder, by flare, by hook—bye bye!
This is, conservatively speaking, the eighth or ninth time Statham has made this movie in the last decade. It’s particularly similar to his 2012 effort Safe, in which he had to protect a pre-teen math genius from the mob; and it’s not even a hundred miles away from last year’s dose of Stathe, David Ayer’s AWorking Man, in which the star had to save Michael Peña’s daughter from human traffickers.
Black Bear Pictures
Shelter Isn't Top-Tier Statham, But It Works
As far as recent Statham vehicles go, Shelter is unfortunately in the lower bracket. But a mediocre Jason Statham movie is still a mite better than your typical January tosh. Waugh lacks the visual flair and gravitas that frequent Statham collaborator Ayer brought to his back-to-back projects with the star, The Beekeeper (2023) and Working Man; and Shelter also takes itself a lot more seriously than those self-aware, ‘90s-inflected pop explosions. At times, this one seems uncomfortably positioned between wannabe-heartwarming makeshift-family harmony and cutthroat action picture. (Safe suffered from the same identity crisis.)
Well-Staged Action Sequences Are the Main Attraction
The powerhouse screen presences of Nighy and Ackie go a long way towards classing up the proceedings, but one senses their willingness to sign on was directly proportional to the scant time commitment. Both are essentially locked down on a single set (Ackie’s MI6 scenes appear to have been lensed on the same set as last year’s Black Bag), reacting to computer screens while Stathe cracks heads. It would be surprising if either spent more than five days on set.
Predictably, Shelter comes alive during its handful of action sequences, all of which are sharply staged and enjoyably gritty. There’s a vertigo-inducing hilltop car chase which plays like a roided-up version of the one at the end of One Battle After Another; and a nightclub-set climax that, after the island atmosphere of the previous 90 minutes, comes across as suitably alien and otherworldly. All in all, good fun. Same time next year?