3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Shelter

2026, Ric Roman Waugh (Kandahar) -- download

Jason Statham is a few months older than me. That puts him square in my non-existent "Aging Men with Gun" category. And yet he still does his own stunts. Keanu is a few years older than us, and he was just under 50 when he did John Wick and by the second movie, part of the style is showing he is affected by the constant one battle after another. But Statham is still a machine, unphased by time but for a few gray hairs in a full beard. Fictionally, that is, as I imagine there were probably a few evenings of ice-ing the glutes after doing his own stunts. Is ice-ing the glutes a thing? I don't know, as I don't do my own stunts.

I just caught and corrected a typo -- "aging men with fun". I am sure I could find enough movies about men past their mid-life crises trying to recapture some of the fun of youth, to create a tag.

OK, this movie is a trope. A lone man (Jason Statham, Killer Elite) lives alone, but for an unnamed dog, on a remote island off the coast of Scotland. He has supplies delivered regularly and the young girl who rows ashore with a crate is instructed never to interact with him. That doesn't stop her from wanting to give him a gift. During one trip, a storm happens upon them quickly and the boat, with her uncle on board, is sunk leaving her barely alive. But the Lone Hero has rescued her and nursing her back to health. Insert tension between curious, traumatized girl and gruff loner, interrupted on occasion by cute dog. But, she is not healing well.

This forces him to leave the island and sneak into town to get supplies, where he is caught on camera. That triggers alarm bells on the British MI6 surveillance system. MI6 is currently going through an upheaval because of said surveillance spying on citizens and allies alike, with head Manafort (Bill Nighy, & Sons) asked to step down as a sacrificial lamb, while secretly asked by the PM to just continue what he was doing. Said surveillance system targets our Lone Hero, now identified as Mason, but mis-identifies him as a Turkish terrorist and a hit squad is sent to the island to kill him.

They are easily and calmly dispatched with young Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Hamnet) horrified by the violence she sees. Mason's isolation is at an end, but he is now focused on getting Jessie somewhere safe. In her brief stay she awoke something in him, something he shut down. Jessie sees a protective father figure and is definitely traumatized by all the death she only very recently has been introduced to.

So, as these tropes go, he has to get from point A (danger) to point B (London; safety, extrication from the country for Jessie) while eluding other agents sent to intercept him. The trouble is that Manafort is sending a Bourne/Black Briar coded agent after him, secretly, while the new head of MI6 is also sending her team after Mason, all the while trying to figure out why the system mis-identified Mason as a Turkish terrorist. These are all typical cat & mouse, chase mechanics, a bit of espionage and hacking tossed in for fun; something right down my alley, and it has a minimal touch which I like.

Except the ending. Something in the Purple Suit playbook says these movies always have to have nightclub scenes now. And London is a required locale when a movie is set in the UK, so Mason has to travel from rural Scotland to London. Sure, geography in the UK is not as "wow, that's so far away" as here in North America, but they dispensed with all the grim, grey nature of Scotland that the first two acts of the movie identified with. And he was able to get all the way from A to B without being seen on the surveillance system that started all of this. That kind of ruined it all for me. And aforementioned nightclub was just a glitterbomb in my Outer Hebrides fascination.  The movie could have easily gone to Glasgow or Edinburgh for its climax, but I guess they needed those colourful, bright helicopter shots to remind us this was a UK espionage thriller.

Part of me watching this oft-used and oft-watched trope had me thinking of how I could transpose it from espionage to fantasy, creating a gruff aging ex-adventurer who hides out in a mountain cabin, having abandoned a world of death behind him, while the royal family, and the mages they make use of, desperately tries to find him, and silence him for the secrets he holds.

Another Unwritten Novel for the notebooks....

P.S. OMG that is a terrible poster, and while not the primary one used, it was just so "AI Slop" reminiscent, I just had to share it.