Shelter takes a gamble on the rare understated Jason Statham performance
Courtesy Elevation Pictures
If all you have is a hammer, it is tempting to see every problem as a nail. If your movie has Jason Statham, it is tempting to see every bearded man as, well, a nail. Or perhaps through the lens that the comedian Gallagher beholds a watermelon. This is probably more apt. Gallagher knows why people show up, and he turns fruit into a chunky red mess. Statham films know why people show up, and watching his dimantle and unending series of dudes has turned him into one of the most consistently profitable movie stars on the planet.
His latest film, Shelter, takes a gamble on pulling the reins wayyyyy in on the star’s paint-by-numbers feature format. There’s a smaller body count, a quieter script, and a thoughtful degree of restraint that delivers one of the man’s best performances in years. It isn’t high art, but it is miles from low brow, and in an era of endless action slop the distinction makes a difference. Far, far from adrenaline junkie action, this intimate thriller borders on being a straight-laced drama with a few bullet ballets added to taste. It is disarming. And it is worth celebrating for these choices alone.
Don’t mistake any of these compliments as reflections on a distaste for the bald bad boy’s beautiful filmography. While he no longer makes the sort of extravagant borderline-experimental splatterfests like Crank, he’s been chugging through a stellar set of Statham pipeline vehicles, where he’s just a guy who wants to do his day job, but very killable people keep getting in his way—The Bank Job (2008), The Mechanic (2011), Homefront (2013), Mechanic: Resurrection (2016), The Meg (2018), Wrath of Man (2021), and The Beekeeper (2024), among others. Oh, and of course, A Working Man—the most working man movie possible.
What his films have all come to share is asking more of him than you would expect from a star of increasing age, especially as you look to something like the just-released The Wrecking Crew, where Dave Bautista feels noticeably absent from the action. These dudes must all take on some slower projects at some point, right? Not Statham, whose pedal-to-the-metal seems determined to launch as many new franchises as possible. Despite The Beekeeper having some of the most distracting Boomer generation politics in this decade, I still cannot wait to see the several sequels all lined up, because they’re simply too silly not to appreciate. But that flick has, undeniably, the dumbest script in an increasingly ridiculous series of Statham staples.
Enter Shelter, which offers Statham a brief reprieve from jumping off buildings, and allows him the intimacy to sit with his thoughts, his scenes, his co-stars, and some genuine emotional complexity. At a clip where you worry the man fears for a day that the paychecks stop showing up, it is a breath of fresh air to spend solitary time with a performer that I fear forgets just how talented an actor he can allow himself to be on screen.
Courtesy Elevation Pictures
Set on a remote Scottish island, a reclusive inhabitant rescues a teenage girl from an accident at sea, which claims her only living family. A man who clearly never wants to be found has accidentally exposed his location to a world of nefarious folk who have been waiting for the opportunity to take him out. After an assault on his house, our hero realizes that the only important move is to make sure this random girl isn’t thrown into the gauntlet he’s about to face. Finding her safe passage proves to be more difficult than he’d hoped, and he is forced to make her safety a priority over his own.
Despite the marketing materials that show an assault rifle-toting assassin engaged in some type of John Wick-style murder ballad, there’s less here than you might imagine that would broach the idea of a setpiece. This is a thriller with some scenes of action at best, and at its calmest… a straightforward drama where a dude keeps getting his hands dirty. To contrast it with the rest of the Statham films this decade, you can look to those to find a guy who “doesn’t want to be doing this,” but the moment someone gives him an opportunity, he does that face that screams, “I’m going to enjoy this.” Cue the EDM music and the quick cuts and the one-liners. This is the first film in a while where you don’t see the guy make the trademark “I’m going to enjoy this” face. He really just wants out. He is never having a fun time with this, and no one else is either. And there is truly no “win” for him, other than the redemption of sparing one innocent person after a lifetime of violence.
Chalk the creative risk up to director Ric Roman Waugh—perhaps my favorite creative lead in action-thrillers of late. The helmer of both Greenland and Kandahar, the man has an incredible skill set for sharpening movies that look like you should laugh them off. The three aforementioned films, much like today’s feature, can all be best described as both heavily invested in driving their leading man to real places of pain and for an absolute lack of anything “stupid” in the movies. Again, a true achievement for blockbuster action releases. Not a character, not a scene, where you’re going to do an eye roll or whisper a line back to your girlfriend while laughing at it. Waugh is making action movies rise to the occasion. While it isn’t a continent-spanning apocalypse adventure like Greenland, the same dedication to the craft is at play here—where the world and tone match the script perfectly, and you never think “Well, I guess they had to put that fight in there, because it was getting a little slow.”
Shelter makes a choice that I get to rarely compliment films on, but it shoots to be akin to Soderbergh’s work. It doesn’t land a bullseye on the target, but I’d always rather give my time to a flick that aims too high and misses, than one that aims for nothing and just machine-guns the target to pieces.
Shelter is playing in theaters now.
