Shelter Review – Super soldier Jason Statham is on duty when he takes on Bill Nighy in the action thriller | film

SYes, what do you like about Jason Statham, but he definitely knows his fan base and gives them what they want. In his latest vehicle, he returns to play the role of a former agent in the armed forces haunted by his violent past and forced to take up arms again. This is the basic setup for the Transporter series in which he starred, many other works featuring Statham and, to be frank, most action films, which (let’s face it) are basically variations on Achilles sulking in his tent in the Iliad until he has to fight again. There is nothing new under the sun.

Shelter, directed by Ric Roman Waugh (Greenland) and working from a script by Ward Parry (The Shattering), feels populated by the tropes of indestructible plastic that have cracked and faded after years of exposure to the blazing sun. Statham plays Mason, a former Special Forces super-soldier with secrets, whom he first meets hiding out on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides, accompanied by the lonely good boy German Shepherd Jack. Fans of the John Wick series will immediately feel anxious about Jack’s future – although if you’ve seen Leon: The Professional, you probably won’t be so concerned about young Jessie (Buddy Ray Breathnach), an orphan girl whom Mason takes under his wing when her only relative, her uncle, is killed in a boating accident. This small spark of kindness leads MI6 to track down Mason, after initially wrongly identifying him as a terrorist, then sending assassins to kill them all and swat them away like so many flies.

Even though the new head of M16 (Naomi Ackie) and her henchmen control every camera in the country and can track the progress of a pimple on Mason’s neck using image recognition, he and Jesse manage to make it from Stornoway to London in what seems like mere hours without being caught, just in time for a nightclub shootout — adapted from Contral but with sleazy techno music. The final boss battle ends with Bill Nighy, the now rogue former MI6 big man, or at least his henchmen, which doesn’t seem like a fair match given how invincible Mason has proven thus far.

Frankly, there’s not a single step in Shelter’s plot that’s completely unpredictable, but to the film’s credit the fight choreography is solid (Waugh was once a stunt actor himself) and the young Breathnach, fresh off her turn as Shakespeare’s Susanna in Hamnet, proves to be a discovery with a future.