Not everybody knows this, but when Blanche DuBois said “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” at the end of Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” she was talking about Jason Statham. Yeah, I know, he hadn’t been born yet, but Williams was very far ahead of his time. If Blanche had only turned to Jason Statham for help instead of Stanley Kowalski, that play would have turned out very differently. And it would have probably involved MI6 for some reason.
The point is, Jason Statham has a history of minding his own business until some rando needs his help, and then dropping everything to save or avenge them from an army of bad guys. He’s protected math savants from Chinese triads, he’s fought sexy grease fights to stop human trafficking, he’s even abandoned a successful beekeeping enterprise to murder online scam artists who fleeced an old lady. Blanche DuBois was only wrong to depend on the kindness of strangers because, as Tennessee Williams no doubt foresaw, those strangers weren’t Jason Statham.
Statham’s latest badass samaritan gig, Ric Roman Waugh’s “Shelter,” finds the action star tending a lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides. Presumably, he was all out of bees. Each week, a man and his niece arrive with supplies, and each week Statham — whose character has a name, but might as well be “Jason Statham” — never even says hello. When the latest delivery comes during a massive storm — though it likely could have waited a few hours — the boat capsizes, the uncle drowns, and Statham is left to care for the young girl, Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach).
Jessie injured her ankle, so Statham travels to the mainland to get the right medicine. Never mind taking her with him and dropping her off somewhere. I guess he’s planning to keep her there indefinitely. “Shelter” plays with the possibility that Statham is a creep with bad intentions, which from Jessie’s point of view is very plausible, but the audience knows better so that’s wasted screen time. He’s Jason Statham. The man didn’t invent “curmudgeonly action hero finds his lost heart of gold,” but only in the same sense that McDonald’s didn’t invent hamburgers. It’s just the thing he does.
Anyway, Statham gets caught on camera during his supply run, which activates an MI6 alert, because wouldn’t you know it? They lost a Jason Statham. You can’t leave a loose Jason Statham lying around. Some little girl could find him and accidentally unleash hell, “Psycho Goreman”-style. Now the lighthouse is crawling with secret agents with a “shoot to kill” order, and it’s up to Statham to protect Jessie, go on the run, and take down [spins the wheel of respectable actors who happened to be free that weekend to film a cameo] … Bill Nighy.
Jason Statham knows how to Jason Statham, and as usual, he Jason Stathams Jason Stathamly. He’s unapproachable in the most approachable way, and he’s convincing in a fight scene. He’s like Silas Marner if cared more about knife skills than money. It’s not a bad bag, and Jason Statham always gets his bag.
He’s matched, and then outmatched, by Bodhi Rae Breathnach, a young actor who graduated from her role in Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet” with an honorary PhD in Tortured Line Delivery. The pained approach she takes to this material — this extremely generic, cookie-cutter material — doesn’t just add depth, it adds a depth charge. Jessie gets over the death of her uncle pretty quickly, and gloms onto a new protector as though her first patriarch never existed, but so did Luke Skywalker and nobody gave him any crap about it, so we’ll let that slide. The point is, Breathnach cooked a five-course meal for a sack lunch picnic, and she deserves credit.
Films like “Shelter” are not about their plot, but somebody should have told that to the makers of “Shelter,” because they get way too wrapped in it. All that matters is Jason Statham has to protect a little girl from bad guys, which means all we really need is a reason for him to do that, and yet the tedious traffic snarl that is the MI6 subplot can’t even make that clear. We eventually figure out why they want Statham dead but the screenplay can’t decide why Jessie needs to be a part of it. MI6 wants her too, right from the beginning, and they never successfully explain why. It’s almost abstract, as though she’s only targeted because on a cosmic level she has to be.
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So instead of making the story clear, screenwriter Ward Parry makes it pretty danged vague. I guess Jason Statham developed a conscience at some point, and MI6 was all like, “Oh, we don’t like that, time to die” and Statham was like, “Well, I’m going to live in a lighthouse for decades” and then a little girl was like “My uncle died” and Statham was like “Ugh, FINE” and then he’s caught on camera by Batman’s fascist cell phone network from “The Dark Knight” but it was coded to ignore his picture but someone changed the code to recognize his picture as another random bad guy but the person who did that and how the hell they knew to do it is never revealed and meanwhile Naomi Ackie just looks at computer screens so that somebody can say “Whaaaaaa?” as though any of this really matters while Bill Nighy gives the absolute bare minimum performance necessary to earn his hopefully-sizable paycheck.
Meanwhile, Statham and Breathnach are out here making the real movie. It’s a formulaic action flick about a grouch who learns to love again, which ironically gives him a reason to kill again. Bodhi Rae Breathnach is the breakout star, and she could very well have an incredible future ahead of her. Jason Statham is Old Reliable at this point. You can always depend on him. To paraphrase the musical version of “Streetcar” — “A Statham’s just a friend you’ve never met.” And what is a friend if not an ex-secret agent who would kill everyone in the world for you?
