“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.

“The Beekeeper” - Call of Duty.

The thing I love about January action movies is recognizing how little care is put into them. That isn’t me being mean. Imagine a writer is pitching an action movie and they non-sarcastically say the word Beekeeper. After doing a spit take, the studio executive is going to immediately think two things. One - January. Two - Liam Neeson, Gerard Butler, or Jason Statham. Meanwhile, the studio executive is also going to notice laughter, but it’ll take about thirty seconds for them to realize they are the one laughing.

Adam Clay (Statham) is a retired assassin, working as a beekeeper and renting a garage from retired schoolteacher Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad). While working on her finances one day, Eloise’s computer pops up a window that says her computer is infected and needs to update her anti-virus software. Unfortunately, Eloise is a cliched old lady, so of course she doesn’t recognize this very obvious scam. Eloise calls the phone number on the screen and a couple minutes later a bank account she manages for a charity is relieved of over $2 million. Later that night, Adam comes up to the house to give her a jar of honey and finds Eloise has committed suicide.

While I can accept Eloise not pausing the phone call to consult with Adam (she clearly wants to, glancing at him through the window a dozen times), I cannot accept Eloise putting a bullet in her head mere hours later without at least telling Adam what happened. Eloise’s decision becomes even more nonsensical when we learn her daughter Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman) is an FBI agent who investigates cybercrimes. But this is a January movie, so we’re going with whatever was the first draft.

On that topic, that first draft of this movie from the screenwriter only includes one more sentence after Eloise’s death - “Combine John Wick, Enemy of the State, and 24.” Adam is going to avenge Eloise’s death by taking down the cybercrime operation and killing anyone that stands between him and its boss. John Wick - check. The criminals are using top secret government spy software to infect people’s computers, software given to them by a former high-level official. Enemy of the State - check. Involve the President of the United States (Jemma Redgrave) and make her good or bad (pick one, it doesn’t really matter). 24 - check.

One way you can tell how bad is the writing is by the number of times the word “beekeeper” is spoken and how often they’ll reference bees. At multiple points, Agent Parker will literally read from a beekeeping manual. Even her partner, Agent Wiley (Bobby Naderi), will snap at her, but I’m not convinced he’s only tired of the bee talk. Raver-Lampman’s dialogue throughout the film is different flavors of garbage and Naderi delivers every one of his lines dripping with sarcasm that is clearly in partial protest for having to hear that garbage. I laughed every time he spoke because I saw what he was doing.

Speaking of garbage, the rest of the characters seemed to have been pulled from a landfill. There are two assassins that Adam must deal with that are like mini-bosses in a video game. They are not developed beyond their appearance and one of them doesn’t even get any lines unless screaming counts as dialogue. And in this film, it kind of does.

Then, there is former CIA director Wallace Westwyld (Jeremy Irons), whose name I did not make up. He runs President Danforth’s business and is also tasked with keeping her idiot son Derek (Josh Hutcherson) out of jail. Irons is just going through the motions, except when he decides to chew up scenery explaining the Beekeeper program (an off-the-books, clandestine assassin program charged with protecting country at all costs) to a bunch of mercenaries, including that they will probably all die. On the flip side, Hutcherson is chewing up every scene he gets, knowing full well his character is little more than a line of cocaine.

Finally, there is President Danforth, a spectacularly poorly written character. She is talked about by other characters as being just short of a supervillain and definitely corrupt, yet the climax would have you believe otherwise. In fact, the climax itself is one giant face-plant, the President reacting to things as if she has just awakened from a coma. I’ll admit that I was entertained at points during the movie (all the action scenes), but the climax was like getting a pie to the face. And not a good-tasting pie.

But I didn’t hate the movie. On the contrary, it was exactly what I expected from a Statham-led action flick opening on January 12. I wasn’t expecting competent writing or layered performances or exceptional special effects. I was expecting a dumb movie, mumbling something resembling sentences in between Statham effortlessly defeating scores of opponents. I would have liked for them to lay off the bee metaphors, but then again, video games tend to do that.

Rating: Even for a January movie, you should ask for sixteen dollars back.

“Wrath of Man” - You think you’re soooo clever.

One of the things I enjoy the most about writing movie reviews is learning new things. For instance, did you know Guy Ritchie was nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award (Razzie) for worst director? And if you were guessing for which movie, it was not for King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, but some random movie called Swept Away starring his then-wife Madonna? Yeah, that Madonna. See? It’s fun learning new things. I also learned that Ritchie’s latest film, Wrath of Man, is a step down from his previous film, The Gentlemen.

(SPOILER ALERT, but if you watch the film, you’ll have it figured out well before the halfway point.)

Wrath of Man continues Ritchie’s streak of movies featuring nobody you should be rooting for. Bad guys vs. really bad guys, where the bad guys are sophisticated and well-spoken and the really bad guys stuck their noses into the business of the bad guys and also don’t dress well. Wrath of Man opens with an armored car robbery, shot from a very interesting perspective. For much of the scene, we cannot see the driver of the armored car, but we can hear him talking to his partner, who we can see, in the passenger seat. This immediately grabbed my attention, seeming to be a setup for a reveal later in the film. Who is the driver? When are we going to hear his voice again? Is he going to part…oh, there he is; nevermind. Guess he probably isn’t important. This will become the recurring theme of this film - disappointment.

The Ritchie movies I enjoy are the ones that are clever. Sherlock Holmes, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Gentlemen. I do not enjoy the ones where Ritchie thinks he is being clever, but is wrong. Wrath of Man is basically John Wick, but if the killer had a believable reason for a murder spree, not a stolen car and strange puppy. Patrick Hill (Jason Statham) is hired as a new guard at an armored truck company. A few days into the job, his partner is taken hostage and the thieves demand the money in truck. Hill goes half Wick on the thieves, killing each with a single headshot, but without all the fancy choreography. In the debriefing with the chief (Eddie Marsan), a couple of lawyers question why Hill is so awesome, and Hill mumbles some of that famous Statham cockney that requires the viewer to turn on closed-captioning. Then, we see Andy Garcia on the phone with the two lawyers, also mumbling some famous Garcia, um, cockney? Whatever it is, he’s nearly as unintelligible as Statham and I quickly forgot that those men existed.

At this point, Ritchie tries to get clever, but fails. The film jumps ahead three months to the next attempted robbery, this time foiled by Hill defying tear gas and scaring off the bandits with a look. I am not making that up - he takes the cloth off his face he was using to thwart the gas and the thieves hightail it out of there. Then, the film jumps backward five months to show us why Hill joined the armored car company, giving us a different perspective of the robbery that opened the film. Unfortunately, it further cemented the fact that the driver was not an important person with a cool back story, just the catalyst for Hill’s revenge.

Once all of the players are revealed, we still have forty-five minutes left of foregone conclusion. Namely, the completion of Hill’s revenge. You’ll be disappointed in how that conclusion plays out, straining your suspension of disbelief to the point where your eyebrow almost flies off your forehead. Even more disappointing is the lack of quick wit that usually fills out Ritchie screenplays. In its place is a bunch of stilted dialogue and cringe-worthy homophobic jokes that would have been out of place even in an 80’s action flick. One character’s name is literally Boy Sweat. I rest my case.

Wrath of Man is nowhere near Razzie level, but it is a decidedly mediocre movie. If you are looking for a heist movie with a whole lot of shooting and killing, it fits the bill. An hour later, you will have a tough time remembering all but one character’s name and who you were supposed to be rooting for. Normally, it’s the guys with the great lines, but this time it’s the guy who kills and has nothing clever to say after. A lot like Ritchie this time around.

Rating: Ask for six dollars back and hope Ritchie’s next film is more Sherlock Holmes and less this.