Jason Statham Is Making A Run As The King of Dad Movies

Photo: Black Bear /Courtesy Everett Collection

As an action star, Jason Statham’s box office fortunes seem at least somewhat tied to his ratio of silliness to grimness. Statham himself is unchanging; that’s what’s made him a new Dad Movie staple (and a contender for Russell Crowe’s crown as King Of The Dad Movies). He releases at least a movie a year, often more, with premises that often sound interchangeable — he’s ex-special forces, ex-British intelligence, ex-assassin, maybe a current assassin, charged with wreaking vengeance and/or protecting someone in need — and a reliably gruff demeanor. But the tone of the mayhem that ensues can vary.

The Beekeeper, Statham’s biggest solo box-office hit… ever, actually, or at least since his Transporter days when adjusting for inflation, skews silly. As Stath works his way through an unlikely conspiracy that starts with defrauding elderly folks through phone scams, he maintains his unsmiling countenance, but the movie goes way over the top in a way that audiences found irresistible. Since then, Statham’s solo work has gotten progressively more, well, serious probably isn’t the right word, and grim makes it sound like more of a slog than it is. But A Working Man, his reteaming with Beekeper director David Ayer, did have a certain grimy sluggishness to the proceedings; at the box office, it performed very much like a Beekeeper sequel failing to recapture that movie’s strange magic. Earlier this year, Statham outright flopped with Shelter, an Ayer-free and even straighter-faced variation on the formula – even if it even counts as a variation, given that Statham protecting a child was already done back in 2012 with the similarly titled Safe.

Given the success Statham has seen as a value-added element of the Fast & Furious and Meg series (both of which allows him to glower at strange, oversized creatures, like prehistoric sharks or Vin Diesel), it’s clear that some audiences prefer their bald British ass-kicker with some degree of levity at hand. It’s hard to begrudge them that – the Transporter series sits perfectly perched between the sublime and the ridiculous – but it’s also a shame in this specific instance, because Shelter, which is now available for rental on PVOD, is the best non-Guy-Ritchie-directed Statham vehicle in… years, actually. Maybe a decade or more. Among his more serious solo movies, its only real competition is the Ritchie-directed Wrath of Man.

Photo: ©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection

Given his excellent work with Ritchie, our man shouldn’t need any help from Ric Roman Waugh, who has made a career out of shepherding Gerard Butler through several sensitive-meathead action movies that range from surprisingly decent (Greenland) to overly, well, to use an earlier adjective, grim (Greenland 2, which came out mere weeks before Shelter, giving Waugh perhaps the fastest-ever single-year double feature in directorial history). But due credit to Waugh: He treats Shelter like a real movie rather than a thin pretense for violent revenge. Statham is Michael Mason, who is, yes, an ex-British intelligence assassin who for extra taciturn-loner points lives on a small island off the coast of Scotland. He receives grocery deliveries from a boatman and his young daughter Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), whose fate becomes entwined with his when Mason rescues her from the churning sea that takes her father. In the process of caring for her, he’s exposed to the surveillance state looking to track him down and eliminate him. So Mason and Jessie go on the run, etc.

Waugh shows patience in establishing the initially testy and ultimately loving father-daughter-style relationship between the two, reminding us that Statham, while not in possession of an enormous range, is a pretty effective actor in the Clint Eastwood mode even when he’s not beating the holy hell out of various henchmen. That said, Shelter does have Statham beating the holy hell out of various henchmen, and Waugh stages the fights and chases cleanly and excitingly. There is absolutely nothing in this movie you haven’t seen before, even if you’re not a Statham fan. But the film assembles its pieces with efficiency and a decent amount of human feeling. If some of Statham’s less accomplished recent movies feel a little too self-conscious about their transgressions against good taste, this one is refreshingly earnest. It’s just rock-solid dad-movie entertainment, which hardly any dads bothered to see in theaters.

Photo: Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Collection

There’s a silver lining, however, and that is no matter what kind of movie Jason Statham makes, it eventually becomes a streaming hit. He’s currently on the Netflix charts with Expendables 4, a movie virtually no one cared to see in theaters despite the earlier three films, and with good cause; it’s a low-rent affair that turns the former action-all-star concept into more of a third-tier Statham vehicle with a supporting performance from Sylvester Stallone, engaging in some of the most hilariously clunky banter that will ever meet your poor ears. He’s also tearing it up on Prime Video, where the much better Operation Fortune – a Ritchie-directed movie that stands as one of Statham’s biggest U.S. flops ever – is apparently being rediscovered. So, while it’s available to rent right now, at some point in the next year Shelter will likely turn up on some streaming service or another and lodge itself in their top ten for the better part of several weeks. We’re in no danger of running out of Stath; he has one called Mutiny in the summer, Beekeeper 2 set for next January, and another Ritchie project on deck. Presumably he’ll show up for the eleventh Fast & Furious movie when the time comes, too.

That’s the thing about a streaming-forward movie-star career: It requires a certain level of churning productivity, even with a big enough back catalog for its own streaming service. (Would I subscribe to Statham Plus, a service dedicated to only streaming Statham movies, Statham commentaries, and movies hand-selected by Statham himself? Possibly, if Sylvester Stallone could be kept away from it.) And that’s the delightful thing about Statham’s prolific inconsistency: Sometimes a movie that has seemingly no reason to be any good at all will turn out to be one of his best.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.

Stream Operation Fortune on Prime Video