Now this seems interesting. The presence of Bill Nighy, Harriet Walter, Naomi Ackie and Daniel Mays on the cast list of Jason Statham’s latest suggests a classier affair than his usual dead-eyed beat-’em-ups. So it proves at first as Statham does some proper acting as the loner Michael Mason, mooching engagingly around his disused lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides with just his dog and a chessboard for company.
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Has the Stath gone indie? Sadly not. Our beanie-wearing hero gets food delivered by boat courtesy of a fisherman and his young niece, Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), and when they get into trouble during bad weather it sets off a chain of events that reveal Mason as an SBS-trained killing machine with a target on his back. From there it becomes much, much more predictable.
The film is directed by Ric Roman Waugh, who did Snitch with Dwayne Johnson and Angel Has Fallen with Gerard Butler, and knows his way around an action scene. A sequence in a busy nightclub is expertly handled, with Mason quietly maiming heavies while dodging dancers and shielding Jessie from harm. Breathnach, who played the daughter in Hamnet, is excellent, although her character will be in need of extensive therapy by the end.
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Obscuring all of that, though, is a script that plunges into hilarious cliché. Nighy, playing the urbane (of course) head of MI6, is given lines such as “Mason isn’t just an assassin, he’s a precision instrument”. In another scene, which raised loud guffaws in my screening, Mason storms a house and the director, instead of showing him grappling with his enemies, simply cuts to a lawn covered with their corpses. Statham fans may still love Shelter, and it makes for serviceable entertainment, but it’s just not, in the end, very interesting.
★★☆☆☆
15, 107min
In cinemas
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