Shelter

dir: Ric Roman Waugh

2026

As a new year begins, at around this time, more reliable than Santa, a new Jason Statham movie is released into cinemas, and into the wild…

Last year it was A Working Man, where he played an isolated ex-special forces guy who has to come out of retirement to save a girl from… something, rich people, probably. To do so he will have to kill many, many people.

The year before it was The Beekeeper, where he played an isolated ex-special forces guy who has to come out of retirement to avenge his landlady’s death because of scammers / rich people. To do so he will have to kill many, many people.

This year it’s Shelter, where he plays an isolated ex-special forces guy who has to come out of retirement to protect a young girl from… powerful rich people in the British government. To do so he will have to kill many, many people.

When you’re on a good thing, stick with it, I guess.

Is he playing the same person? I’m not sure. They have different names, but they all do exactly the same things and they all look exactly the same, and grunt in the same charming way.

All his characters in every film all act like what fuckheads who watch Joe Rogan or “read” Jordan B. Peterson’s books think a stoic would act like, ignoring the fact that someone who lived the precepts of something like Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations wouldn’t travel the world killing hundreds of people at a time. They have confused stoicism, a belief that neither the good times nor the bad times in life last that long, and you shouldn’t get too attached to either of them, with grim men exhibiting no emotion as they grimly murder their way through the world.

I know he’s in other films, slightly other types of films, but we know he’s not going to vary that much. He is a man who has one way of playing a man, generally. Only one way.

But wait! I’m no Negative Nelly, only looking for the bad in movies so I can poke fun and amuse myself and others, in order to ignore, if only for a few minutes, all the escalating insanity in the world. I should also find positive elements, nice things to say too, shouldn’t I?

This has way less of the usual lumbering action that one expects/demands of Statham, but it still has cliché scenes in cliché settings. There’s even a shootout scene in a nightclub, when neither of the two main characters, given their ages, should ever be anywhere near a nightclub.

There are a lot of scenes of professional killers wandering around not expecting that Jason Statham is going to pop out of nowhere and kill them, despite the fact that it just happened again, and it keeps just happening. But that’s what we expect, what we demand, apparently, living as we do in a post-John Wick world, where if we don’t watch a single person kill over a hundred opponents over the course of a film, we demand out money back, or throw our drinks at the screen, both futile methods of protest if you ask me, and you certainly didn’t.

If there is one minor detail that I could point to that differentiates this role from at least 30 films Statham has done where he does exactly the same thing, the one thing he did here that I admire him for, or at least the screenwriter, is that even if he’s playing the same grim jerk as always, he never yells at and is never mean to the kid he’s protecting. Sure, he’ll put multiple bullets in multiple foreheads, but at least he is gentle with the child at all times.

It might sound like I’m taking the piss, but I’m genuinely not. In these kinds of reluctant protector movies, quite often before the cranky old buzzard warms to the child who through no fault of their own is a lost waif in a cold, brutal world, they freeze them out or yell at them to toughen up, wanting them to become cold psychopaths just like them. I hate that intermediate stage, because it seems so doubly cruel. But they don’t go down that path here, if anything she, being Jessie (Brodie Rae Breathnach), humanises him.

She does a bit of “John Connor teaching the Terminator about the value of human life” from T2, if you will.

I’ll be the first to admit how superficial it is. Plenty of times he flat out murderises opponents before they ever know he’s there, but whenever Jessie is watching he’s like “ok, ok, I’ll just shoot them in the leg”, like that’s any safer. Shoot them in the leg = a safe alternative to killing them is hilarious to me, in that there’s a great chance you’d be tearing through their femoral artery if you ever shot anyone in the leg, which means they’d bleed out in minutes.

But what the fuck would I know: I’m neither a medical professional nor a professional butcher of men. I do know one thing, though: Movies!

I am not going to argue that this is a good movie, or better than the last three he’s done, or better than the next five he does. If this flick does at least one thing terribly, it’s wasting Bill Nighy in a somewhat pointless role as a secret spymaster abusing surveillance systems and trying to murder a whole bunch of people, including a child, for dumb reasons, but the problem’s not even that. It’s that the movie takes Bill Nighy and plonks him in a room on his own, where 90% of his screen time is squandered on having him look concerned at something on his monitor. He doesn’t usually even have a scene partner to work off, just talking intently to people who aren’t there but we’re meant to think are on the phone.

What a waste. He can be ordinary, he can be great in certain roles, but it’s not going to work if you isolate him and don’t give him a human being to work off / work with.

Naomi Ackie can also be great, and is somehow in 57 pf the 100 or so movies I watched last year, but again she spends most of the movie staring at a screen and getting increasingly agitated. She is the “good” guy spymaster who thinks she’s in control of MI6, when really Bill Nighy is still running things without her noticing, because he has super powers of bureaucracy and the favours of a surveillance goddess called THEA. Everyone knows that London has the most security surveillance of anywhere on the planet, but did you know it's across all of Great Britain / the World, since this system picks up anything anywhere on every device?

How did we get so complacent that we accepted eternal surveillance as the price of having shiny phones? It seems…insane. Movies have been warning us for years about the dangers of AI (they will try to kill us all), panopticon surveillance (bad people will be able to find us wherever we go and try to kill us all) and becoming too reliant on technology (we will be helpless when it turns on us and we don’t even have bones anymore in our jelly-like legs to run away with, like in WALL-E), and we just never listen, because we value comfort and convenience above all else.

I mean, we could be like Statham’s character here at the beginning of the film, living in a lighthouse, grimly peering out of the window, drinking dark liquors every day, waiting for a weekly delivery of food and more booze, and that would be great. Paradise. Low tech, sure, but free from doomscrolls and constant distraction.

And then one moment caught by a camera at a second hand charity buying clothes for the recently familyless girl, and it’s on for young and old as Bill Nighy sends all nasty black clad agents to kill everyone but especially the child.

Why the child? Villains don’t have to explain themselves to the likes of you. It’s probably for the glory of the Empire or the “greater good” or some such nonsense. All you need to know is, get the job done. As well as all the faceless masked goons, Nighy sends out someone who’s meant to be on Statham’s level. Not like these hundreds of cannon fodder goons, who are there just to be killed swiftly.

All he is referred to as is Workman (Bryan Vigier). Workman, who seemingly has no compunctions against killing children, should have instead attacked Statham in a different film, being A Working Man, with Workman attacking the Working Man, just like the owners of the means of production want, as they then would have embodied different elements of the working class experience for a more well-rounded representation of the wants and needs of the proletariat / precariat.

That’s how they keep us divided, comrades.

Instead, as he is here, the question for our money, since a lot of the flick feels like it was lifted from the Matt Damon Bourne movies, is whether Statham will kill him most brutally or not. Will he transcend expectations, his own programming, his desperate need for parental approval (Nighy brings on “daddy” issues for many viewers and protagonists), will he show Jessie that he’s taken on her pro-life stance, and show mercy to his opponent, to show him as well that there is a better path in life, a gentler one?

Or maybe he’s just going to kill him in the most brutal way possible? What would you bet on, if you were a betting person / degenerate gambler?

There is nothing new under the sun, we all know that, but I didn’t mind this latest instalment in the “old cynical person regains lust for life by protecting a child and killing lots of people”. Also, Statham, playing an English guy, doesn’t have to do an American accent, so there’s that, too. That’s a net benefit.

Still, it’s fairly lazy action fare, that we’ve seen countless instances of before.

6 times Statham should be made to eat the opponents he kills, to teach him the real cost of his wicked ways out of 10

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“When you use a weapon, you never operate from fear. Always balance your emotions. Keep your wits.” – good advice to presidents and precocious teenagers with machine guns alike - Shelter