I enjoyed the extra strength absurdity of THE BEEKEEPER, but man am I happy that Jason Statham can still make his serious movies. SHELTER is his latest, directed by Ric Roman Waugh (SNITCH, ANGEL HAS FALLEN) and written by Ward Parry (THE SHATTERING). This one’s more of a traditional action movie than REDEMPTION, but a little more grounded than HOMEFRONT. Maybe somewhere in the range of WILD CARD or SAFE. To me its familiar Statham tropes make it feel classical, not generic. These movies are like a good song or poem. They hit on themes we’ve explored a million times, but they do it with their own words and melodies.

Statham plays a guy named Michael Mason, but you don’t know that name until pretty far into the movie. He never says it, even when asked. He’s a grumpy loner living on a tiny Scottish island with only his dog (who doesn’t have a name at all). You assume this guy’s a lighthouse keeper until somebody says the lighthouse doesn’t even work. It’s always gloomy and stormy on this island, and when his friend and his friend’s teenage niece Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach, HAMNET) come drop off supplies he never comes down to say hi, he just skulks around on his hill like some weird guy looking out the window of a mansion in an old horror movie. Jessie is such a sweetheart she tries to leave him presents to cheer him up but he won’t accept them.

Mason’s hobbies include brooding in cool poses in the dark and playing chess against himself. He seems to only eat porridge and only drink vodka. I found the emptiness of his life profoundly sad, especially after the time lapse shots imply that it’s just this all day every day forever. Obviously he’s hiding out from something – when Jessie knocks on his door and tries to talk to him he implies that it’s dangerous to be around him – but why even bother to run from your past if this is the present you’re running to?

Well, tragedy strikes and the status quo changes. The waters are so violent that Jessie’s dingy flips over and her uncle’s trawler sinks trying to get to her. Mason jumps right into action (I knew he was gonna have to dive in this movie!) and is able to save Jessie and revive her with CPR. When she wakes up and he won’t tell her much or call anybody for help she regards it as a kidnapping situation. Breathnach (who reminds me of Saoirse Ronan) is a very good young actor and makes the pathos sting. Her uncle might’ve gotten out of there if she hadn’t stuck around trying to talk to Mason, so she might be feeling some guilt about that, and Mason might be also. But nobody has to say it out loud.

It seems like Mason has no idea how to be friendly until Jessie wakes violently from a nightmare and, having some experience with that himself, he goes to tell her she’s okay. Startled, she pulls out a hunting knife she stole from him, so he combines his comforting words with a lesson on how to grip the knife properly. And she seems interested. A great bonding moment.

This is really two of my favorite formulas that almost always work. Obviously one of them is the bitter grouch whose heart slowly warms because of a child. As he gets used to Jessie’s company he starts to turn on lamps and expand the dinner menu. He even smiles when he looks out the window and sees her talking to the dog. Then he starts drawing a picture of it! It’s possible that he’s been making drawings this whole time, but I never noticed any evidence of it, so I like to think that this tiny bit of humanity coming back into his life reignited an old artistic passion. Either way we have ourselves a Badass Juxtaposition.

Favorite Formula That Almost Always Works #2 you could probly also guess due to this being a movie starring Jason Statham. Mason is, of course, a former elite badass motherfucker just trying to live a regular peaceful life, and now somebody comes for him and unleashes the beast. When he takes his little boat to the mainland to get medical supplies for Jessie the surveillance state spots him. His face is in the background of some teenager’s selfie video and it triggers a warning to MI6.

Yes, of course he has a secret past with the agency, which he abandoned for good reason. Somebody there is after him and it could be anyone. Totally unrelated to that, Bill Nighy (CURSE OF THE PINK PANTHER) is in the movie playing Mason’s former handler, and he has the good upstanding totally trustworthy name Manafort. Naomi Ackie (MICKEY 17) is Manafort’s assistant Roberta, who spends most or all of the movie in the command center looking at screens, but she fulfills that role admirably.

The funny thing is when Mason’s retinal scan triggers their alarms it says he’s some Algerian terrorist. There’s a picture of the guy and it’s definitely not Mason! This is a reality we have to deal with now, that law enforcement are among society’s stupid motherfuckers who are prone to falling for a.i. scams, so they’ve invested in programs that pretend-enhance photos, creating completely imaginary suspects for many recent high profile crimes. I really liked the idea of that being what happened here, it’s an algorithmic fuckup that just happens to send them after the wrong wrong guy. But in this case there’s a conspiracy behind it. Anyway when they send a bunch of commandos after Mason we learn that he had another hobby on that island besides vodka and solo chess: preparing cool booby traps for the day they come for him.

For both entertainment and poetic reasons I like how much he accomplishes without guns. Eventually he steals one and shoots a guy when he sees Jessie in trouble, but before that he makes do with knives, hooks, oars, things like that. Oh, and the lighthouse! Tools of the sea.

Then they go on the run and Jessie is happy to be the Robin to his Batman. I love the part where he hands her some high powered military type rifle, asking if she’s ever fired a gun. Yeah, she’s shot squirrels with her uncle’s air rifle. “Good enough,” he says and rattles off rapid fire tips about the weapon, like that the trigger is sensitive and that she should put her back to the fence. It’s an example of the perfect tone of this movie – it made me laugh but it’s not at all wacky. It’s partly a joke but mostly a character moment. It says that he’s crazy enough to give her this weapon, but also that he respects her enough to trust that she can figure it out, and furthermore that she will try to live up to that trust without complaint. And she does, but again not in a wacky way. She doesn’t turn action hero, there’s not some jokey slo-mo shot of her firing off shots and screaming like Rambo. But she does her part.

He’s also, considering the circumstances, pretty considerate to the farmer (Ryan Fletcher, BEATS) he forces to give him stitches. When he finds out the guy’s son (Rodaidh Findlay) snuck off and called the cops he doesn’t show any anger to the kid about it. As in THE BEEKEEPER where he beats up armored cops with his bare hands, he makes quick work of these chumps, quickly rotating through the various weapons he steals from them (taser, club, etc.). He really doesn’t give a shit about them, they’re just the obstacle between him and the actual danger, an amoral operative named Workman (Bryan Vigier, THE KILLER 2024). He’s a simple character, basically a Terminator-meets-Jason-Bourne who keeps coming after them, but a very effective villain. I noticed he looked like Staham’s FAST & FURIOUS brother Luke Evans, and yep, turns out he was his stunt double in WEEKEND IN TAIPEI.

I like how the scope of the story slowly opens wider and wider. At first we’re completely isolated on this island. It’s kind of a shock when he goes into town and there are streets and people and businesses. Then we jump right into the corridors of power – a cabinet meeting at Downing Street, an MI6 command center, pretty soon he’s running all over the place. I definitely didn’t expect him to ever end up in a big crowded dance club called Neon Dragon. All the sudden it’s like a JOHN WICK movie, except he’s dressed like a sailor. (I laughed when I finally saw a clubgoer give a double take that a kid was with him.)

Statham does his serious Statham things: he grimaces, he wears thick comfy sweaters, his face looks like a very cool and angular drawing, he swings fists that look the size of those Hulk hands you buy at the toy store. The fights are well done, and largely punch-based, so it’s exciting when he throws in a spin kick or a body slam. I can’t claim the action sequences are particularly inventive, but they tend to have nice little touches like the part where they tear through the plastic walls of a greenhouse, or the car chase on a bumpy road with just the right amount of visual chaos to knock you around without becoming confusing. He doesn’t get stuck with one weapon or method, he keeps changing it up, which I very much appreciate. Second unit director/stunt coordinator Steve Griffin (KNIFE EDGE, GUN, BULLET) is prominently credited, a trend I also appreciate.

But even in a good action movie with good action the action isn’t always the best part. Here it’s the emotions behind the action – he put himself in the position of having to do all this to protect this kid – okay, yeah, that’s normal. Anybody should do that. But we believe it because we saw her make that grump smile. We see that when he tries to hand her off to other people and act all stoic about it he really is doing it only for her safety, because it crushes him to leave her.

A funny thing about this one is that I was so sure that he was going to turn out to be her father, who pulled a Luke and Leia by leaving her with his friend he used to serve with and now feels like a fuckin deadbeat about it. When Jessie still thinks she’s abducted she lies that her family will come looking for her, and is surprised that he knows she has no family – she never knew her father, her mother died of cancer. Later Mason noticeably reacts to the sign for a thrift store run by a cancer charity, and I thought yes, of course, he lost his wife to cancer, and it still hurts.

So I was surprised when they never revealed anything like that. And I wondered if the filmmakers took the unusual step of putting that in there but not feeling the need to spell it out. Then I realized that what was really being communicated by his reaction to the cancer charity was something much sweeter – not trauma, but empathy. The sign made him think about what this girl has been through, losing her mother, and he wanted to buy her some clothes as a gift. And she does appreciate the gift.

You see, in a normal movie I think they would have made him her dad. They’d feel they needed a plot twist, and more importantly a more direct connection, a reason besides humanity for him to care so much about a kid. But in a Jason Statham movie that type of motive is not necessary. To change your whole life out of a duty to your buddy you served with, that’s just standard protocol. And this time that protocol saves his life. That’s the song that’s being sung here. I love that song.