in Shelter. Photograph: FlixPix/Alamy
Say what you like about Jason Statham, but he definitely knows his fanbase and gives them what they want. In his latest vehicle, he is back playing a former armed-forces operative haunted by his violent past who is compelled to take up weaponry again. This is basically the setup for the Transporter franchise in which he starred, many more works featuring Statham and, to be frank, most action movies, which are (let’s face it) basically variations on Achilles sulking in his tent in the Iliad until he is forced to fight once more. There is nothing new under the sun.
Shelter, formulaically directed by Ric Roman Waugh (Greenland) working from a script by Ward Parry (The Shattering), feels populated by indestructible plastic tropes that have cracked and faded after years of scorching sun exposure. Statham plays Mason, once a special-forces super soldier with secrets who is first met hiding on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides, with only goodest boy German shepherd Jack for company. Fans of the John Wick franchise will immediately feel anxious about Jack’s future – although if you’ve seen Leon: The Professional you probably won’t feel so worried about young Jesse (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), an orphaned girl whom Mason takes under his wing when her only relative, her uncle, is killed in a boating accident. That little spark of kindness triggers MI6 to track Mason down, having first falsely identified him as a terrorist, and then sending assassins to kill him all of whom he swats away like so many flies.
Even though the new head of M16 (Naomi Ackie) and her minions have control over every camera in the country and could track the progress of a pimple on Mason’s neck using image recognition, he and Jesse manage to make it all the way from Stornoway to London in what seems like mere hours without being caught, in time for a nightclub shootout – cribbed from Collateral but with crappier techno music. The final boss fight ends up being with Bill Nighy, MI6’s now-rogue former top man, or at least his own minions, which hardly seems like a fair match given how indomitable Mason has proved so far.
Honestly, there isn’t a single step in Shelter’s plot that isn’t entirely predictable, but to the film’s credit the fight choreography is solid (Waugh was a stuntman himself once) and young Breathnach proves, after her turn as Susanna Shakespeare in Hamnet, that she is a find with a future.
• Shelter is out on 30 January in the UK and US, and on 5 February in Australia.
