It’s Not the Man Who Takes to the Sea…
It’s been a while since we’ve accepted that Jason Statham will only play Jason Statham—he’ll even push the joke to the limit by playing himself in David Leitch’s upcoming Jason Statham Stole My Bike. These days, originality isn’t the main metric on the scorecard, but rather the level of intensity.
As long as we’re watching the actor roll out the same anti-hero archetype film after film, it should bring real punch on the action side.
That’s why Shelter is criticized more for its lack of breath than for its prefab premise. We could have overlooked this stale tale of a former agent in a covert MI6 unit, a rather uninspired mashup between James Bond’s spies and Jason Bourne’s Treadstone. We could also have accepted the “save-the-girl” beat, as in A Working Man, Safe and Homefront, and even the big-boss who wears the “villain” badge on his forehead, only to turn out to be a traitor with blood on his hands.
But only if you raise the body count (dead bodies, to be precise) and maintain tension, or at least a certain edge. And Shelter had the ingredients for that with a squad of overarmed mercenaries landing on a small island riddled with traps. It could have given us another Maman j’ai raté l’avion with the brutality of a Rambo: Last Blood (even if that isn’t the ideal comparison). However, after a shipwreck and an assault far too brief to savor and executions far too clean to make you grimace, the plot itself decides to drift. Too bad for a $50 million movie, which had more than enough means to deliver the spectacle.
TAKE SHELTER
Shelter lacks a distinctive identity as it tries to be a little bit of everything at once: an intimate drama, a rough action-thriller, and a geopolitical conspiracy that recycles every espionage cliché and caricature. There’s a fleeting car chase, just as brisk gunfire, and hand-to-hand combat that feels uninventive, sandwiched between expositional dialogue and strokes of manufactured emotion.
Every so often, Ward Parry’s script remembers that Naomi Ackie is also in the cast and thus deserves lines, if not a reason for her to step out of her office.
Everything stays surface-level, be it the baffling dynamic between Michael and Jessie, the mass surveillance and security overreach (which is an opening premise but not really a topic), or the Iran nuclear program’s involvement, mentioned in passing as if it weren’t at the heart of international affairs today. What remains is a dull and largely forgettable film, whose ultra-basic, even sloppy direction by Ric Roman Waugh doesn’t help elevate it.
Sadly for us, the moviegoers, the next David Ayer project, John Doe, looks equally stale with its amnesiac killing-machine premise, just as Mutiny by Jean-François Richet (Mayday) promises Jason Statham playing a former special forces operative turned head of security drawn into an international conspiracy. By comparison, we almost can’t wait to see him back with David Leitch for his big meta-action comedy.
