SHELTER Reviewed by GREG KING
Director: Ric Roman Waugh
Stars: Jason Statham, Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Bill Nighy, Naomi Ackie, Daniel Mays, Bryan Vigier, Harriet Walter, Tom Wu, Ryan Fletcher, Bronson Webb, Gordon Alexander, Anna Crilly, Bally Gill.
The latest Jason Statham action thriller Shelter is formulaic stuff and delivers exactly what you expect from one of his films – lots of bone crunching action, fights, shoot-outs, destructive car chases, and a high body count.
Statham plays Michael Mason, a former special black ops assassin for the Black Kites, a shadowy elite covert arm of British intelligence, who has been living off the grid for a decade after walking away from an assignment. He is currently living a solitary existence in an abandoned lighthouse on a remote windswept island somewhere off the Scottish mainland. He receives regularly delivered supplies from Jessie (newcomer Bodhi Rae Breathnach, who recently made her film debut in Hamnet), a teenager grieving the loss of her parents and living with her uncle.
Then one day a fierce storm blows up, and their boat is wrecked. His niece Jessie is almost drowned, but Mason rescues her and nurses her back to health. While on the mainland to buy some medical supplies in a coastal village he is photographed by a phone camera, which is part of T.H.E.A., an Orwellian AI driven covert surveillance system established by his corrupt former boss Manafort (Bill Nighy) to track terrorists. (T.H.E.A. stands for Total Human Engagement Analytics.) Mason’s profile has been altered, and he has been identified as a dangerous terrorist so that Manafort can be alerted to his presence.
Before long a squad of heavily armed soldiers arrive on the island with orders to shoot to kill. Mason takes them down using some cleverly designed booby traps and his own skills. But then he is forced to go on the run, to try and keep Jessie safe and expose Manafort’s conspiracy. While racing across the country, a bond develops between the surly Mason and the reticent Jessie, who has lost everyone she cared about and begins to regard Mason as a surrogate father figure.
Manafort dispatches his own hitman Workman (Bryan Vigier), who is every bit as lethal as Mason, to take him out.
Shelter is the sophomore feature written by Ward Parry (The Shattering, etc). It is directed with muscular confidence by Ric Roman Waugh (Angel Has Fallen, etc), a former stuntman. Waugh brings his expertise to the staging of the film’s exciting and kinetic action sequences, and he maintains a fast pace throughout. The brutal, bruising fights sequences are superbly choreographed. Kudos to the stunt performers.
Shelter may remind many of the 1998 thriller Enemy Of The State, which starred Gene Hackman and Will Smith and explored the topic of pervasive government surveillance. However, Perry’s script misses an opportunity to criticise the overwhelming government program of surveillance instead opting for plenty of visceral action.
Statham’s Mason is another in a long line of quiet, taciturn but lethally efficient action heroes with a dark and complicated past and a special set of skills that come in handy – the type of role that he and Liam Neeson have been playing for over a decade. Statham is still one of the more credible action heroes around with a physicality that seems effortless, and he makes this stuff look easy. He is in his element here, but he also gets to show a more introspective side of his screen persona. And there is a genuine chemistry between him and Breathnach that adds another dimension to an otherwise formulaic actioner.
Breathnach brings a nice resilience and vulnerability to her performance. As the villainous Manafort Nighy delivers his cliched lines in typically droll fashion, but his role here hardly stretches him. Naomi Ackie, who played Whitney Houston in the biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody, is given little to do as Roberta, Manafort’s former assistant who has just been promoted and is struggling to work out what is happening within her organsiation. She watches the action unfold on computer screens in her control room.
While it may not be particularly original, Shelter is a fine addition to Statham’s filmography.
★★★
