SHELTER is not your typical Jason Statham film. Sure, he’s a one-man demolition squad when it comes to giving the bad guys their comeuppance, but the character is not a caricature nor is he a cardboard cutout spewing quips and taglines. Rather this is a Statham with a quiet presence in stark contrast to the violence of which his character is capable. As I’ve said ad infinitum. Statham is an actor that has always made anything that he is in better by his participation. Here, he is allowed to explore the very qualities that make that true with a serious script that never resorts to flippancy.
We will learn his name eventually, but at the start Statham is a man living on a tiny island in the North Hebrides. He and his equally unnamed dog are the only inhabitants on a spit of land whose only structure is a lighthouse. It is from the top of this lighthouse that Statham scowls with steely eyes at the horizon, scouting for any visitors other than the trawler that delivers his supplies courtesy of Jesse (Bodhi Rae Breathnach). She’s a spirited adolescent who hikes the path to his door and who refuses to humor Stathan’s gruffness even when it involves an order to stay away. Instead, she chides him for not saying thank you for the present she’s brought him, or the weekly schlepping of the ci-mentioned supplies as her Uncle Jack keeps the trawler from crashing into the rocks.
Things, no doubt, would have gone on this way indefinitely if not for a storm that sinks the trawler and leaves Jesse struggling in the surf. Statham immediately leaps into the roiling brine to rescue the girl without regard to his own safety, thereby rescuing her and setting himself on an unexpected course.
Of course, he is a man on the run. Of course, the people from whom he’s running are powerful and capable of killing him and Jesse without consequence or even much of a second thought. Of course, Statham fends off all comers, including the Black Ops agent (Gordon Alexander) 20 years his junior but with all the same skills. As in a guy who faces a nail gun and barely stops to take those nails out of his arm before continuing the fight, with his biggest reaction being irritation at being delayed. It makes for intricately choreographed fights that are, and I don’t say this lightly, mesmerizing or their artistry with evenly matched opponents discovering the surprise of battling someone worthy of them.
This alone would be a great time at the movies, but Statham has also met his match with Jesse, a kid traumatized but capable, cool in a clinch and processing her grief over losing her last family member by slowly transferring her filial affections to Statham. As for Statham, he’s also cool, speaking in simple declarative sentences whether informing Jesse about her uncle’s death, or showing her how to properly hold the knife she’s stolen from him to defend herself. But there is something about the way he slaps a stopper into his liquor bottle just a little too hard, the way he goes out of his way to avoid killing bystanders that bespeaks an inner struggle that spurs his belief that saving Jesse will redeem his past life, if not absolve him of it entirely. Breathnach, with her somber face and determined eyes eschews a feigned maturity. She is always a kid on the cusp of adulthood with a preternatural ability to stay strong when treated with the respect ordinarily accorded an adult. Plus, it being Statham, there is something in the way he tells her in a growly whisper that everything is going to be alright after a gunfight, that makes it credible that she believes him. We all do.
The action, and there is plenty, is sleek and muscular, filmed with shadowy lighting that perfectly reflects the undercover lives these protagonists are living in the shadows. A chase on a narrow country road proves as raucous as those in other films that tear up city streets. The mood is one of quiet menace with a score that pulses with danger. Add to that the pernicious specter of constant state surveillance, legal or not, and the troubling truism voiced by one government official that if you haven’t done anything wrong, there’s nothing to worry about. Privacy, once again, is presented as an outdated concept, an idea that can’t help but give us pause.
At one point friend-turned-foe Billy Nighy opines that Statham’s character is a precision instrument. That is a perfect description of a guy who can take out an elite extraction squad while shielding Jesse from the worst of it even as SHELTER also acknowledges that Statham is getting on in years. Raising this action flick a notch above the standard is a bittersweet embrace of the good and the bad that comes with aging, and finding if not peace, at least détente. Statham has never been better, or, in a twist we didn’t see coming, more moving.
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