The typical Jason Statham character is a taciturn loner with a dark and secret past, maybe as a hitman, a safe-cracker or a former member of some special forces unit. Statham knows what he’s good at, and it’s provided him with a modest living (he’s said to be worth $100m, and can command fees of $20m per film).
His latest, Shelter, is a chip off the old block. Statham plays Michael Mason, a taciturn loner with a dark and secret past, who lives in frugal isolation in a derelict lighthouse on a barren lump of rock in the Hebrides. He has an Alsatian dog for company, and amuses himself in a curmudgeonly sort of way by playing chess against himself. Meagre supplies arrive intermittently aboard a small fishing boat, and are rowed ashore to Mason’s island by the skipper’s daughter Jesse (Bodhi Rae Breathnach, pictured below with Statham).
The stone-faced Mason never indulges in pleasantries or indeed any kind of social interaction with young Jesse, and one day she’s had enough. We keep bringing you stuff but you never say thank you, hello or anything else, she points out. He reluctantly lets her in, but while they have a kind of silent non-conversation, the weather turns dark and stormy. Jesse leaves to row back to her uncle’s vessel, but the heaving waves tip her boat over. Suddenly it’s action-Statham time, as he springs into action, jumps into his own boat and rushes to the rescue.
Long story short, he saves Jesse but the trawler and her uncle are lost. Jesse has sustained some injuries in the process, and Mason makes a mercy dash to Stornoway to buy some medications to tend her wounds. But, as he suspected it might, this leaves him vulnerable to the all-seeing super-surveillance that apparently exists everywhere (it’s known by the acronym THEA, and it’s the sort of thing the Starmer politburo would love to foist on us all), and suddenly there are all kinds of alarms going off in secret places in Whitehall.
Whatever it is Mason has done, a number of very important persons want to find him badly. Here, we meet Bill Nighy (pictured below) as a dessicated and murderous secret service chief, who informs us that “Mason isn’t just an assassin – he’s a precision instrument.” He’s in cahoots with the Prime Minister, played by Harriet Walter wearing an untrustworthy smirk, and the order goes out that Mason must be tracked down and eliminated.
Thus, Mason is pitched back into the world he knows best, though now he takes on the burden of responsibility for safeguarding Jesse. "I don't have anyone else," she points out, heart-rendingly. Luckily his very particular set of skills remains miraculously un-atrophied by his storm-tossed isolation. When a boat-load of tooled-up SAS-type raiders lands on his island, they’re swiftly overcome by a combination of Home Alone-style booby traps and lethal combat manoeuvres. When Nighy sends an unpleasant specialist assassin after him, Mason gets a chance to show off advanced driving tricks and displays a remarkable ability to withstand high-speed pile-ups. Irritatingly, he passes up at least two chances to finish off his pursuer for good, so he keeps bouncing back like Banquo’s ghost stuck on repeat.
Formulaic and utterly Statham-esque though it is, Shelter is a tight and punchy thriller, directed with no-frills efficiency by Ric Roman Waugh (he directs Gerard Butler movies too, so you can tell where his head’s at). It also marks the arrival of a potential new star in Ms Breathnach (also to be seen in Hamnet), who displays an empathy and range of expression remarkable for somebody only born in 2011.
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