Shelter

Unfortunately, the copious asses that Jason Statham kicks in his latest ass-kicking opus yield diminishing returns. “Shelter” starts well enough with Statham as a man of mystery who is not so mysterious because, of course, certain ass-kicking backstory is automatically baked into such a Statham character from the jump. In this case, his ersatz enigma Michael Mason is hiding out on an uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland and being delivered supplies that seem to consist entirely of bottles of liquor by a teenage girl named Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and her uncle (Michael Shaeffer), a former associate of this strange hermit. If it might strain credulity that Jessie would take such an interest in the gruff, uncommunicative Mason, I kept thinking of the scene in “One Battle After Another” when teenage Willa asks Col. Steven Lockjaw in all oblivious earnestness why his muscles are so big. Teenagers are on a different wavelength, man. And so, when Jessie winds up injured and stranded on the island, she gradually breaks down his impersonal wall, which proves good and bad, especially when Mason’s ex-MI6 assassin background finally catches up with him and the semi-unwitting current MI6 chief Roberta (Naomi Ackie) sends a black ops squad across the sea to deal with him. 

The sequence in which Mason dispatches this death squad one-by-one with minimal fuss is promising. It subverts expectations by forgoing full-throated Schwarzenegger “Commando” mode for something else as Mason effortlessly pilfers and uses their own weapons against them, not quite taking them all out with his own bare hands but coming close. What’s more, Statham’s air, a small gleam in his eyes, suggests a thrill of the hunt, a thread too sinister for writer/director Ric Woman Waugh to pull. Indeed, as Mason and Jessie are forced ashore, bit by “Shelter” peters out. True, there is something refreshing in Statham allowing his character’s actions to convey his burgeoning affection for Jessie rather than laying the emotions on thick, but nothing is ever really made of the Jason Bourne-like black ops program (underlined in how Bill Nighy never gets to truly cut loose as the bad guy) and the action gradually loses all sense of creative sizzle. The climactic showdown in a dance club denotes how Waugh just starts pulling locations off the action-thriller rack. By the end, when Mason is dispatching the one pesky assassin that just won’t quit, that original gleam in his eye is conspicuously gone and he looked the way I felt: ready for it be over.