MOVIE REVIEW – Shelter is an action thriller that plays like someone mashed up the world of The Last of Us with a bargain-bin The Bourne Identity, with Jason Statham once again running through a role he could probably do in his sleep. The story barely strays from well-worn tracks, and most of the characters function more as plot devices than actual people. The action, though, is solid, occasionally even sharp, even if everything else tastes reheated.

Look, if a formula works, it works. The number of times Jason Statham has played a former elite, state-trained black-ops type whose fragile peace is shattered by something sudden and dramatic is, frankly, not small. The Beekeeper, Wrath of Man, The Mechanic, Hummingbird, Parker, and now Shelter all follow the same blueprint, with the British action star offering slightly different shades of the same core figure. His hero walked away from a world that clashed with his rigid moral code, hoping never to kill again. Sorry, Jason, but it seems escaping the assassin lifestyle isn’t that simple.

Shelter is more or less exactly what it needs to be: a competently choreographed action thriller with punchy, energetic fight scenes. Statham leans into his usual strengths, playing a hardened yet surprisingly soft-hearted outsider. Coming after Ric Roman Waugh’s other 2026 effort, Greenland 2: Migration, the film makes no attempt to reinvent the wheel, which might be for the best, since there’s an undeniable pleasure in watching the no-nonsense Brit dispatch bad guys while dressed like he stepped out of a Banana Republic catalog. The movie also features a few of the tightest hand-to-hand fights of Statham’s career.

Here, Statham plays Michael Mason, a name deliberately as bland as James Bond’s is iconic. Mason, however, has none of Bond’s charm. He’s a bearded, gruff recluse determined to avoid human contact at all costs. Don’t worry, he’s not a sociopath: he has a black husky he clearly cares about. Mason lives alone on a remote Scottish island in the Outer Hebrides, spending most of his days staring out at the violent sea, downing vodka, and playing chess by himself, and he seems to never even bother taking his clothes off, not even to sleep.

A Hermit, a Girl, and Trouble on the Way

Mason gets supplies once a week from Jesse (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), the daughter of a friend, who rows out to his shore in a tiny boat. One day, though, a storm hits, the boat capsizes, and Mason is forced to dive into the freezing water – turtleneck still firmly in place – to pull her to safety. In the chaos, Jesse badly injures her ankle, and although the tight-lipped Mason knows just how dangerous it is for him to enter the nearby town, he has no choice if he wants to help his new companion.

Almost the moment he sets foot in a pharmacy, he draws the attention of MI6. It turns out Mason once belonged to an elite group of state agents known as the Black Kites, a fictional unit created by the now-former MI6 chief Manafort (Bill Nighy). Operating outside traditional covert structures, the group was so secret that only he and the Prime Minister – the unfortunately underused Harriet Walter, known from Succession – were aware of its existence.

Why Mason ended up on the outs with both MI6 and the Black Kites remains a mystery for much of the film, but when the answers finally come, they’re almost charming in how generic they are. The entire movie blends seamlessly into the broader Statham action subgenre and countless other action films. Its setup borrows from The Bourne Identity, the bond between Mason and Jesse echoes Léon: The Professional, and the mythos surrounding Mason clearly takes cues from John Wick.

Action Works, Emotions on Paper

This isn’t to say it isn’t fun to watch Statham effortlessly floor weaker opponents while trying to get Jesse to safety, but it does mean the film is forgettable by design. The John Wick movies work so well because they lean fully into balletic action, but Ward Parry’s script makes the ironic mistake of trying to convince us to care deeply about Mason’s emotional bond with a child he has just met. It never quite adds up why Mason would go this far out of his way for her.

More intriguing is the film’s political undercurrent regarding state surveillance. Early on, we learn that Manafort is under fire for helping build a system that illegally strips ordinary civilians of their private data in order to identify and neutralize terror threats more quickly. For a moment, it seems Parry and Waugh might be building toward a larger point about how AI-driven surveillance is inherently flawed, since it will inevitably put innocent people at risk, but that thread is dropped almost as soon as it appears.

Shelter remains murky on many fronts. Nearly everyone’s motivations are questionable, from Manafort’s pursuit of his former protégé to Mason’s obsessive protection of Jesse, and even Jesse’s attachment to Mason. That doesn’t even get into Roberta Frost (Naomi Ackie), Manafort’s successor at MI6, whose role mostly boils down to staring at computer screens in disbelief, despite Ackie being capable of far more.

Statham Still Carries It

Waugh knows how to stage an action sequence, and Shelter is, in the end, an electrically charged action movie as long as it sticks to the action. Statham is now so comfortable in these roles it’s like they’re tailored to him. It’s hard to overstate how steady a presence he is, to the point where he easily smooths over Parry’s thoroughly average script. Still, maybe next time Statham’s character could be given more to do than take revenge on a bunch of unprepared fools.

-Herpai Gergely „BadSector”-