“Shelter” - In place.

Is Jason Statham really a box office draw? Statham’s latest film Shelter will provide another data point to that question, whose answer seems to be maybe(?). If all you do is look up the box office returns for Statham’s body of work, you’ll get a number somewhere between $1.5 and $2 billion, spread over sixty-three credited acting roles.

But what if he’s not the lead? Nobody can seriously argue that Statham, not Dwayne Johnson or Vin Diesel, is why people paid to see the Fast and Furious movies. Spy was just a weird time where we all got drunk and binged Melissa McCarthy for a while. Definitely not The Expendables, a franchise built exclusively on one last hurrah for 1980s action stars. Or The Italian Job, another years-long drunken bender where we thought Marky Mark Wahlberg might be something. And let’s be honest, people went to The Meg for the title character, not the puny human tasked with hi-yah-ing it. 

Boil it down to just Statham-led movies and the number shrinks way down to the hundreds of millions. 2024’s The Beekeeper looks like his most successful film, pulling in $162.6 million on a $40 million budget. But that’s the world-wide box office. It’s a good box office given that budget, but it’s also low enough to explain why his non-shark, non-co-starring-The-Rock movies still only get modest budgets and tend to open any time outside of when people actually go to movie theaters. If you hear or read that Statham is a bankable action star, they mean bankable January action star.

Statham is also a very specific kind of action star. Remember Liam Neeson’s character in Taken? The guy with special skills that can get things done? That role typecast Neeson and became his character for - if my math is correct - Neeson’s next forty-eight movies. Well, Statham plays that exact same character, but with all of the cheat codes turned on. And Statham has played that character for his entire career; you won’t find a Schindler’s List or a High Spirits or a Love Actually anywhere near Statham’s filmography.

Which brings me back to the movie at hand - Shelter. If you seen a Jason Statham movie, you’ve seen Shelter. He’s always ex-special forces who’s left the service for whatever reason. When an innocent gets wronged or someone needs protecting, Statham’s character is there to protect the innocent and/or kill all the bad guys. If we’re lucky, this might be the movie where an enemy lands a punch or two, but never anything that hinders Statham’s character even the slightest bit.

In Shelter, a corrupt spy chief (Bill Nighy) has programmed a surveillance AI called THEA to flag any ID of former MI-6 black ops assassin Mason (Statham), with orders to kill Mason on sight. At the same time, Mason is saddled with caring for the recently orphaned Jesse (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) whom Mason rescued from the ocean during a storm that killed Jesse’s uncle. The teeny tiny story twist here is Mason is the innocent (so to speak) victim who needs protection. Jesse is just there as a convenient character growth device for Mason (as well as the reason he gets spotted by THEA), as well as a level of difficulty for Mason since she has to be protected during the fight scenes. That’s no big deal though because the cheat codes are still set to maximum.

This is my roundabout way of saying Shelter is a very generic action movie featuring a very generic action guy. There are moments in a handful of other Statham movies where we get a glimpse of something beyond invincible, rogue super soldier. He’s capable of some great banter (Hobbs & Shaw). And we know he’s game for wacky movies (Crank). Maybe if he did more of those, his films wouldn’t feel so repetitive. And if those films’ box offices proved he really could carry larger movies, he wouldn’t have to costar with more bankable stars like Johnson or prehistoric marine life. They’d have to costar with him.

Rating: Ask for fourteen dollars back like you usually do in January.