‘Shelter’ Review: Jason Statham Plays a Lighthouse Keeper Who Won’t Stay Retired

Starring Jason Statham, Shelter checks almost every box in the contemporary “John Wick-style” action subgenre. It belongs equally to the “they killed my dog” category and the more classic “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” variety, with a healthy dose of the “I look like a lonely guy living in the middle of nowhere but I’m actually a highly trained operative capable of killing people by the hundreds.” For a good stretch of its running time, though, the film plays like a modest, low-key version of all that—a B-movie even by the standards of director Ric Roman Waugh, a genre specialist best known for working with Gerard Butler, and of Statham himself, who recently starred in the very similar but considerably punchier The Beekeeper.

Shelter ticks faithfully to the subgenre’s playbook. Statham plays a man without a name who, we eventually learn, is called Michael Mason. He lives in a lighthouse on a remote island off the coast of Scotland (the Outer Hebrides, for those inclined to Google them), accompanied only by a dog, a beard, and a perpetually sour expression. His only contact with the outside world comes once a week, when a supply boat shows up. “Supplies,” in this case, mostly meaning alcohol. A teenage girl—Bodhi Rae Breathnach, recently seen as Shakespeare’s eldest daughter in Hamnet—drops the goods at the door and leaves. Mason appears to have chosen a near-monastic existence built around basic meals and long stretches of staring out the window at the restless sea.

Until one day a storm prevents the girl and her uncle—the man piloting the boat—from returning to the mainland. Mason is forced to abandon contemplation and go out to rescue them. He manages to save the girl but not her relative, which leaves Jessie—now stranded on the island—recovering from injuries, eating improvised mush (no one is bringing supplies anymore), petting the dog, and tolerating Mason’s grumpy presence in that windswept corner of Scotland. Eventually, though, someone has to venture out to find medicine and food in the nearest town. That’s when things go sideways. Security cameras capture Mason’s presence, and hell promptly breaks loose beneath his feet. Soon enough, a dozen secret operatives descend on the island and—much to Jessie’s surprise—Mason dispatches them like a bearded, grown-up version of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.

You can probably guess what comes next. Mason has a secret past, a bitter enemy (an MI6 boss played by Bill Nighy, who presumably received a very nice check for his five or six scenes of routine villainy), some murky conflict he once fled, vaguely defined political objectives, and now a girl to protect when the hordes arrive to finish him off. Unlike John Wick and its many cousins, the people trying to kill him here are—at least initially—agents of the British secret service. In practice, though, for quite a while he only has one particularly persistent hunter (played by Bryan Vigier), who obsessively alternates between fistfights and car chases with him. And, as has become fashionable lately, he does it all with a kid in tow that he has to keep safe.

Shelter eventually folds into its plot various elements involving surveillance cameras, citizen-level spying, and internal tensions within MI6 (Naomi Ackie plays Nighy’s number two, who doesn’t appear to know everything her boss is up to). But from that point on, the movie mostly becomes a continuous attempt to stop Mason—no easy task, because, well, that’s the law of cinema: if the guy dies halfway through, what exactly are we supposed to do for the rest of the movie?

Everything works reasonably well, albeit with a noticeably smaller dose of visual spectacle than what the genre usually delivers. Except, of course, at the end. It feels as if the entire budget was saved for the finale: a long, violent sequence set in London involving hundreds of extras in a nightclub and its surrounding streets. Like many action movies of this sort, Shelter seems engineered around three major set pieces—one at the beginning, one in the middle, and the biggest one at the end—and then it figures out what to do with the rest, which nobody really cares about all that much anyway.

The director behind Greenland and Angel Has Fallen, among others, is a competent action filmmaker, and he manages to lend a degree of credibility to this formula picture, which ends up being more effective than it initially appears—and, at least for a while, somewhat calmer than its peers. The storyline of the “cold, ruthless adult who rediscovers his humanity while protecting a child” has been seen hundreds of times before, and here it’s presented more or less as usual: a way to turn what is essentially a brutal action narrative into something that vaguely resembles a drama about parents, children, dogs, and secret services.