Jason Statham’s Shelter and Jason Momoa’s The Wrecking Crew duke it out to survive the Black Hole Movie vortex
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Bill Nighy, left, plays a spy master and Jason Statham presumed-dead MI6 assassin in Shelter.Daniel Smith/The Associated Press
Shelter
Directed by Ric Roman Waugh
Written by Ward Parry
Starring Jason Statham, Bodhi Rae Breathnach and Bill Nighy
Classification 14A; 108 minutes
Opens in theatres Jan. 30
The Wrecking Crew
Directed by Angel Manuel Soto
Written by Jonathan Tropper
Starring Jason Momoa, Dave Bautista and Morena Baccarin
Classification N/A; 122 minutes
Streaming on Prime Video starting Jan. 30
In a column last week, I waded into the dark vortex of “Black Hole Movies,” a contemporary phenomenon in which ostensibly marquee-level movies with genuine stars and high budgets were disappearing into the unforgiving algorithmic maw of streaming giants. This weekend, two new films arrive that feel like just the kind of B-movie affairs that, in a different era, might have earned a decent buck at the multiplex in the dead of January.
Except in the case of the Jason Statham thriller Shelter and the Jason Momoa/Dave Bautista buddy-cop romp The Wrecking Crew, there is a curious case of mistaken identity: The movie that is going straight to streaming is ambitious and fun enough to deserve the big screen, while the one that is actually headed to theatres feels like it would be more at home, well, at home.
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Let’s tackle Shelter first. Like nearly every single other entry in Statham’s filmography over the past decade-plus, this film finds the throat-kick-first-ask-questions-later British brute playing a former special forces operative who has vowed to Leave That Life Behind™. And yet, thanks to a selfless act of kindness – as when he’s avenging a fallen neighbour in The Beekeeper, or searching for a trafficked family friend in A Working Man – our hero finds himself getting up to his old tricks. And by “tricks,” I mean killing anonymous goons with remarkable ease.
In Shelter’s case, the details don’t matter as much as the set pieces, though if you must know, the story this time around has Statham playing a presumed-dead MI6 assassin whose whereabouts is revealed after he rescues a young Scottish girl from a storm. The details of even that threadbare Jason Bourne-again plot are both lazy and absurd – just wait until Bill Nighy pops up as history’s sleepiest spymaster – but we don’t come to these kinds of movies for the narrative. And yet director Ric Roman Waugh (who has helmed some of Gerard Butler’s best films, sincerely) simply cannot deliver the goods when it comes to the fisticuffs and firefights.
It takes about half an hour of deathly dull surrogate father/daughter bonding between the young actress Bodhi Rae Breathnach and Statham’s loner hero – named Mason, presumably because it rhymes with Jason – until any henchman is shot in the face. Which is about 26 minutes too long. And when the big action sequences do finally arrive, they’re chopped to hell in the editing bay, with nary an originally staged kill in the lot. Statham is as enjoyably stern and semi-serious as ever, but his sturdy presence cannot enliven a weirdly buttoned-up exercise in mercenary mayhem.
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The Wrecking Crew, on streaming, stars Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista.Prime/Supplied
Shelter’s wide theatrical release wouldn’t be so odd or frustrating, though, if the movie weren’t being released the same day that The Wrecking Crew bypasses theatres completely, settling on a streaming-only debut through Amazon’s Prime Video. Starring Statham’s Fast & Furious colleague Momoa, who is paired here against his Dune co-star Bautista, the energetic and often downright anarchic action-comedy accomplishes everything that Shelter ought to have pulled off. The set pieces are outrageous and inventive, the setting engagingly exotic and the performances fully committed to charming the pants (and other items of clothing) right off of you.
This isn’t to say that the latest film from director Angel Manuel Soto (2020’s Charm City Kings, the 2023 DC Comics adventure Blue Beetle) is prestige cinema, or even A-level action on equal footing with a Michael Bay or Gareth Evans film.
The story is a cobbled together bit of non-twisty nonsense involving two estranged brothers (Momoa and Bautista) reuniting in Hawaii to solve the murder of their private-detective father. Some of the visual effects used to cap the larger chase and fight scenes reek of rushed digital deadlines. And I would love for the actress Morena Baccarin (a regular of Shelter director Waugh’s filmography) to get more to do in any of these kinds of movies other than roll her eyes at her uber-macho male co-stars.
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Momoa and Bautista, who play estranged brothers reunited to solve their father’s murder, are having a blast in The Wrecking Crew.Prime/Supplied
And yet there is an infectious level of delirium to many of Soto’s action sequences here. From a brutal melee between Bautista and various henchmen that deliberately echoes Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (right down to the vicious use of a hammer) to a highway chase that involves motorcycle-riding yakuza warriors, Bautista “erasing a man’s head” in real time (to borrow the helpful words of Momoa) and a helicopter that goes haywire, The Wrecking Crew goes far harder than any direct-to-Prime title in history.
What’s more: All the bloody, emphatically R-rated chaos (I didn’t think I’d laugh at the sight of a severed arm, but here we are) is also stitched together by genuinely warm and funny performances from its two leading slabs of beef. Unlike Statham’s tendency to bring death-stare solemnity to his material (with such notable exceptions as his Crank films and Spy), Momoa and Bautista are having an unhinged blast in The Wrecking Crew, as eager to rip each other a new one as they are to compare themselves (unfavourably and intentionally) to such contemporaries as John Cena and Dwayne Johnson. What more could you want this January?
