What’s It About

A recluse on a remote Scottish island rescues a girl from the sea, unleashing a perilous sequence of events that culminate in an attack on his home, compelling him to face his turbulent history.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Jason Statham stays busy making the same movie over and over, and “Shelter” might be his most forgettable effort yet. Coming from director Ric Roman Waugh, who gave us “Angel Has Fallen” and “Greenland,” this new action drama tries real hard to make us care about a grumpy hermit protecting a teenage girl from government assassins. The whole thing feels tired from jump, like everyone involved showed up for a paycheck and nothing more. The story drops us on a remote Scottish island where Michael Mason lives alone in a lighthouse with his unnamed dog. This man stays so isolated that when a young girl named Jessie and her uncle bring him supplies every week, he won’t even let them walk up his front steps. Jessie gets curious about this mysterious stranger and breaks his rules one day, knocking on his door to ask why he acts so cold toward them. Mason snaps at her to never come back up those stairs. Real friendly guy, right? Everything changes when a massive storm hits and Jessie’s uncle drowns after his fishing boat flips over in the violent waves. Mason watches the whole disaster from his house and rushes out to save Jessie from the same fate, though he can’t reach her uncle in time. Now Mason has an injured teenager recovering in his home, and she starts naming his dog Jack while trying to figure out what makes this man tick. These scenes between Statham and young actress Bodhi Rae Breathnach work better than they should, mainly because Breathnach acts circles around Statham every single time they share the screen. The plot kicks into gear when Mason heads to the mainland to grab medical supplies for Jessie’s injured leg. A surveillance camera catches his face, and boom—the British government’s controversial tracking system called THEA identifies him as a former MI6 agent who supposedly died ten years back. Turns out Mason faked his death after refusing orders to kill an innocent person, and now his old boss Steven Manafort, played by Bill Nighy, wants him permanently erased. Manafort sends a deadly operative named Workman to hunt Mason down, and the rest of the movie becomes one long chase sequence with Jessie stuck in the middle. Here sits the biggest problem with “Shelter”—nothing about this setup makes a lick of sense. Mason drags this orphaned teenager through gunfights and car chases instead of dropping her somewhere safe, like an orphanage or with child services. She’s not his daughter. She’s not related to him at all. The bad guys aren’t even after her—they want Mason dead. But his ego won’t let him think anyone else can protect Jessie better than him, so he makes her a target by keeping her around. The movie never explains why Mason thinks running through London with a scared kid makes him less noticeable to the people trying to murder him. If anything, traveling with a teenager makes him stick out more. The film wastes talented actors left and right. Naomi Ackie, who blew us away in “Blink Twice,” plays Roberta Frost, the new head of MI6. Her character spends the whole movie standing in dark rooms staring at computer screens while other people feed her information over the phone. That’s it. Bill Nighy brings some spark as the scheming villain Manafort, but the script gives him nothing interesting to chew on. Both actors probably wrapped their scenes in two or three days max, collected their money, and moved on with their lives. The action sequences land somewhere between adequate and forgettable. Waugh knows how to film hand-to-hand combat, and watching Statham beat down groups of attackers delivers exactly what you expect from this kind of movie—nothing more, nothing less. A few shootouts happen. Some punches get thrown. Nobody will remember any of it five minutes after leaving the theater. The visual effects look cheap in spots, pulling you right out of scenes that should create tension. What really sinks “Shelter” is how seriously it takes itself without earning that seriousness. The movie wants us to feel emotional weight in the relationship between Mason and Jessie, but we never get real reasons to care about either character beyond the most basic information. Jessie’s mother died from cancer a few years ago, and now her uncle drowned, leaving her alone in the world. That’s sad and all, but the script repeats the same conversations between her and Mason over and over until you stop listening. They talk about trust. They talk about abandonment. They talk about survival. Then they have those exact same talks again twenty minutes later. Even Statham looks bored in several scenes, going through the motions like he’s thinking about what to cook for dinner later. The surveillance technology subplot makes the confusion worse. The movie keeps telling us THEA represents this all-powerful system that tracks everyone everywhere, but then scene after scene shows THEA struggling to locate Mason even though he’s walking around in broad daylight with Jessie. The government conspiracy angle feels tacked on, like the writers needed some bigger stakes but couldn’t figure out how to make it matter. Prime Minister Fordham and Manafort scheme about expanding THEA’s reach while dodging a public inquiry, but none of it connects to the main story in meaningful ways. At one point, Mason crashes into a packed nightclub with Jessie to meet with a gangster named Kamal, asking him to smuggle Jessie out of the country. Mason never bothers asking Jessie if she wants to leave Britain and start over somewhere else entirely—he just decides for her. This teenage girl becomes a prop for Mason’s hero complex, reduced to a “damsel in distress” so Statham can look tough saving her repeatedly. The movie could have revealed Mason as Jessie’s secret biological father, which would’ve been predictable but at least would make sense. Instead, “Shelter” asks us to believe this stranger cares so much about a girl he barely knows that he’ll risk both their lives rather than find her actual help. Bodhi Rae Breathnach delivers the strongest performance in the cast by far, bringing real fear and vulnerability to Jessie even when the script fails her. She deserves better material than this. Statham coasts on his usual tough-guy persona without stretching himself at all. Daniel Mays pops up briefly as Booth, the tech genius who created THEA, but he leaves zero impression. The first thirty minutes drag like crazy, showing Mason’s boring routine on the island before anything happens. The editors could have cut that section in half without losing anything important. Once the action starts, the movie settles into a rhythm of chase scenes and fights that all blend together. Nothing surprises you. Nothing excites you. Everything unfolds exactly how you think it will from the opening credits. “Shelter” fits perfectly as one of those forgettable action movies you’d find playing on cable television on a lazy weekend afternoon—the kind you half-watch while scrolling on your phone. Compared to Statham’s better vehicles like “The Beekeeper,” which understood how silly it was and had fun with that silliness, this movie takes itself way too seriously for a plot this thin and illogical. When you build a story around a supposed hero who technically kidnaps a child and drags her through life-threatening danger for no good reason, you’ve already lost the plot. Skip “Shelter” unless you’re desperate to sit in a warm theater during cold weather and don’t care what’s on the screen. Unfortunately, it’s competent enough to function as a movie, but empty enough to disappear from your memory before you reach your car in the parking lot.

OUR RATING – A TIME WASTING 4