SHELTER -- Dull, Inert Action-Thriller Trades Thrills for Snores

Review by Daniel Lima

It’s hard being a Ric Roman Waugh auteurist. You spend years championing his particular brand machismo-melodrama, slow burns about men attempting to leave a violent past behind, or otherwise living on the fringes of society with only the faintest grasp on their morality. You see the glimpses of something great, but none of his projects fully succeed in delivering on the promise of a methodical action-thriller. You see he has a new film starring Jason Statham, one of the most reliable leads working in action cinema today, capable of elevating the most humdrum programmer into something at least passable. Then you sit through Shelter and despair, because you’ve run out of excuses to make for such shoddy, dull work.

Statham is a man with a mysterious past, living alone in an isolated lighthouse, who finds himself taking care of an injured teenage girl. Unfortunately, sleeping dogs never lie, and so the two find themselves on the run. The grizzled man desperately trying to keep the girl safe while figuring out who exactly is after him.

One would expect that a movie like this would move at a breakneck pace, introducing Statham’s man of few words with only the most economical storytelling before throwing him into a constant barrage of violence. Shelter studiously ignores the impulse to be that crowd pleaser, instead taking on the air of a contemplative, po-faced drama, more Michael Mann than David Ayer. The film slowly builds out the banality of Statham’s life before the girl is thrust into his care, then labors through her slow recovery process. The spy thriller B-plot is handed with a cold remove, lots of people in barren rooms spouting dry exposition about “assets” and “national security risks”. Even the action is pared down from the usual fare, slow moving car chases and minute-long fistfights.

For the Ric Roman Waugh defender, this is par the course. All his films tend to take on this dreary affect, reflected not only through narrative, dialogue, and visual aesthetic, but how any given scene moves. This one is no different, replete with agonizingly long silences, shot-reverse shots of people looking very seriously at each other, characters repeating actions and lines in a way that seems calculated to artificially inflate the runtime. In a roundabout way, this muted approach almost achieves the same kind of delayed gratification one gets when watching Jeanne Dielman; even the lamest half-quip out of Statham is like a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart, every bit exciting as a middle-aged woman that forgets to do a household chore.

The problem is the bones of Shelter lack the nuances and thematic richness of a Jeanne Dielman, or a Heat, or even a The Beekeeper. This film is structured like any number of generic, skull-brained action-thrillers about gruff, shadowy men who learn to open their hearts to some innocent soul. The dialogue is filled with nothing but cliches, particularly in the scenes away from Statham, which seem to only be there out of obligation to what is expect of these kinds of stories. The deepening relationship between Statham and his young charge is an informed trait, as they two lack any chemistry and the film skips over any emotional intimacy the two share before the bullets start flying.

None of this is an issue in a lean, muscular action B-movie, the kind that Statham can elevate even when everyone else is asleep at the wheel. When a film begs to be taken as seriously as this one, however, it is impossible to reconcile the stupidity of these individual elements with the attempt at dramatic gravity. The latter undermines the former, and the former sucks all the charming camp of the latter. The end result is a grueling, taxing chimeric beast, satisfying to neither the audience looking for a meat-and-potatoes slugfest nor someone looking for more elevated fare.

I’d like to say that Waugh still has a great film in him. Even within this rather poor outing, I can see an artist attempting to do something novel, just with material that is ill-suited for the experiment. After enduring the likes of Shelter, however, I am walking into the next attempt with great trepidation. 

Shelter releases in theaters January 30.

Rating: 1.5/5