Love Actually star Bill Nighy is great as MI6 boss Manafort. Even when the Prime Minister (Harriet Walter) fires him from his post after a surveillance scandal, he doesn’t bat an eyelid – and you immediately sense that he’s the one who actually holds the reins firmly in his hand. Without batting an eyelid, he orders murders on British soil – and if one or two innocent citizens or even police officers fall by the wayside, then that is nothing more than regrettable. But when Manafort switches on his computer and the wanted poster of an old acquaintance appears on the desktop, even the ice-cold, controlled secret service veteran lets out a spontaneous “Shit!” out of here. And that’s actually all that’s needed to be said about Michael Mason (Jason Statham), who was just living a hermit existence on an islet off the coast of Scotland, but now has to deal with an elite shadow army of the corrupt spy apparatus.
It’s actually easy to imagine the bearded “Expendables” star as someone grumbling to himself on his own little island, his self-imposed solitude only interrupted by an old comrade (Michael Shaeffer) who ships in supplies with his niece Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) once a week. And it has to be the island in the new action game from “Angel Has Fallen” director Ric Roman Waugh, because the usual hermit’s hut deep in the forest probably wouldn’t have been enough for these opponents: After all, in “Shelter” Jason Statham has to deal with a surveillance device against which even the technology from Tony Scott’s “Public Enemy No. 1” looks like a child’s toy. No matter what kind of camera happens to record him, the secret service immediately receives a warning – and with the first dangerous red pop-up window, the impending small war can hardly be averted.
For Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), Michael (Jason Statham) takes on old enemies – half a dozen if necessary.
Although: In the description of the picture above this paragraph, I initially wrote “if necessary, dozens” before I reduced the number of simultaneous opponents when I read it again to “if necessary, half a dozen”. Apparently I still had Statham’s previous David Ayer escapades “The Beekeeper” and “A Working Man” in my head, in which the ex-diver really just mows through his opponents. In comparison, “Shelter” is much more down-to-earth – every punch and every shot counts, and when the first bullets from the sniper rifle unexpectedly hit, you flinch for a moment in the cinema. In addition, before the first “A-Team” 18-plus-esque action sequence in which Mason defends his trap-riddled island against an elite MI6 group, the film pleasantly takes a lot of time to establish the central relationship – with Bodhi Rae Breathnach directly confirming the strong impression she already left in her appearance as the daughter of Jessie Buckley, who won an Oscar for the role, in “Hamnet”.
The dynamic with the silent warhorse, whose supposedly petrified heart first has to be thawed by a bright teenager, is anything but new – we last saw this, for example, in “The Spy Next Door” and the sequel “The Spy Next Door 2” with Dave Bautista. But it works most of the time, and this time it works particularly well, also because Ric Roman Waugh almost completely foregoes the obvious jokes and carries out his escape road trip with surprisingly serious emotion – very similar to his previous two films “Greenland” and “Greenland 2”, only this time the protagonists are not on the run from an asteroid, but “only” from an almost omnipotent surveillance device. Especially since Mason’s old enemies got one thing wrong: Jessie isn’t his Achilles heel that makes him weak, but the one that gives him the strength and will to kick all their asses…
It’s getting fiery: Mason has been preparing for years that someone might find him in his hiding place again!
Some Statham fans will surely complain that “Shelter” takes too long to get going – and even then only delivers a comparatively subdued display of action. But after his over-the-top performances in “The Beekeeper” and “A Working Man” – as much fun as they were – Statham has to be careful not to become his own parody at some point. And that’s exactly where the no-frills “Shelter” comes in handy! Only in the case of the MI6 machinations would one still have wished for one or two more twists – because the full surveillance conspiracy seems as if it had simply been put together from a few other comparison films without any of its own ingredients. There would definitely have been more, especially with the great Bill Nighy.
Conclusion: The stoic island hermit Michael Mason gets caught up in an off-the-shelf paranoia plot. But it’s still Jason Statham who has to fight his way through the conspiracy thicket here, and so the result, which features an astonishingly good cast, is nevertheless rock-solid action fare, this time again of the more down-to-earth variety after the rather aloof “The Beekeeper” and “A Working Man”.