Bill Nighy – The Magnificent 60s

Even though it’s easily one of the worst in the Jason Statham canon, I feel duty bound to review this because a) it’s set in a remote Scottish location, the Outer Hebrides, famed for the likes of Whisky Galore (1949) and its sequel and b) because I’ve been a paid-up member (possibly one of the few) of The Stath Fan Club. So I was half-expecting to see the imprimatur of Creative Scotland on the credits, but when I checked it out, realized I’d been sold a dummy and that for “tax reasons” it had been filmed in Ireland with an occasional sign slotted in to suggest it was set in Stornoway.

But I’m afraid our Jason has fallen victim to the Dwayne Johnson affliction, whereby the successful action hero believes he has to show he can “act.” In this case, Jason is saddled with a young girl which means, by virtue of Sergei Eisenstein’s dictat, every time he glowers the hostility is softened because the camera cuts to the girl.

The reasons this falls down is not so much that very little makes sense in the first place (even though that’s a very low bar anyway) but that the director loses faith in the original idea and having set up the notion of former Government gun for hire recluse Mason (Jason Statham) battling through the wilderness of the land and seas around the Sottish Western Isles to safeguard his unwelcome charge, the orphan Jesse (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), that’s suddenly abandoned and we are relocated to London for a shoot-out in a nightclub.

The screenplay draws extensively on the Bourne films. Mason has been hiding out in a lighthouse on a remote island, quietly drinking himself to death, because principles got the better of him a decade past and he refused to kill an innocent man so when he is discovered alive when the records have been rigged to show he is dead, MI5 (or MI6) chief Manafort (Bill Nighy) wants him exterminated so, as in the Bourne series, some other assassin’s phone lights up and the hunt is on.

Logic is in complete absence. Mason’s been off the grid for a decade. Give him a few more years and he’d be dead from alcohol poisoning. And if you wanted to eliminate him, all you’d have to do is cut off his weekly supply of food and booze and wait for him to starve to death or sit in ambush till he leaves the island in his tiny boat.

Instead, some unknown person for no apparent reason has fitted (technology-wise) Mason up as a terrorist so MI5 (or MI6) go in all guns blazing only to discover he has an effective web of Rambo-style defences. He’s got a tech buddy (Daniel Mays) on Stornoway who can fix the tech problem but he’s dying of cancer so in no fit state to look after a, no matter how meek, teenager. So after more bloodshed, they’re off to London apparently secure in the knowledge that in the small matter of getting on and off the ferry required to take them to the mainland they can move unseen and that’s despite the fact that he’s been tracked using the tiniest available access points on all sorts of mobile phones and cameras on Stornoway.

Naturally, the only person who can get Jesse to safety in London is a drug trafficker and her freedom is complicated by the arrival of the same shady MI5 (or MI6) guys and genuine MI5 (or MI6) guys who couldn’t spot them traveling on any of the 400-odd miles it took to get them to the capital.

It’s not just Jason Statham going all gooey Dwayne Johnson that doesn’t make it work but the girl is a refugee from The Pony Club or National Velvet, a posh lassie who looks as though she’s had every inch of teenage-ness surgically removed and as if she’s never heard of Home Alone and hardly aware that you’ve got to show some spunk not mooch around complaining you’re going to be left alone while wanting (apparently) to be liked the murdering varmint accompanying you.

So with that relationship in screen terms dead in the water, the movie has to fall back on some garbled secret system called T.H.E.A. and an incredibly young incoming head of MI5 (or MI6) Roberta (Naomi Ackie) who looks young enough to be Jesse’s big sister (Ackie is only 35) whose job is to sort out the resultant mess.

I mentioned in a previous article how some careers were sustained by the overseas market rather than their box office returns in the U.S. and that’s been largely the case with Statham. Shelter stiffed on opening weekend in the U.S. taking just $5.5 million though it’s knocked up another $7.7 million worldwide.

Although Statham has had an unlikely hand up the Hollywood tree by being parachuted into the Fast and Furious franchise and being the leading man (or last man standing) for The Meg duo, his fortunes otherwise at the box office have been variable. The Beekeeper (2024) hit an unexpected $162 million worldwide ($66 million Stateside) and A Working Man (2025) delivered a tolerable $89 million worldwide ($37 million domestic) and even Wrath of Man, despite a poor $27 million in the U.S. crossed the $100 million mark when all other markets were taken into account.

Even so, I doubt if worldwide will redeem this one. I had thought after such a run of duds in January (and you can add Primate to the list) I could depend on Statham to redeem a poor month. Alas, no.

Directed by Ric Roman Waugh (Angel Has Fallen, 2019) from a screenplay by Ward Parry (The Shattering, 2015).

What is it about the British, hardly renowned these days for cinematic output, that they can confer late-onset stardom on hitherto supporting player?

To a list that now includes Olivia Coleman (The Favorite, 2018)), Lesley Manville (Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, 2022) and Jim Broadbent (The Duke, 2020) we can now add Bill Nighy best known for a rumbustious turn in The Boat That Rocked (2009).

And in a movie that is so slow, so bereft of any action, it goes in the polar opposite direction to current Hollywood offerings. Worse, it’s set in moribund England of 1953 and almost wilfully ignores that year’s great event, a hook that would undoubtedly have attracted The Crown crowd, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, whose funeral barely a couple of months back generated record global television audience.

*The new movie does steal this seminal image from the original “Ikiru.”*

The characters all exist in that worst of all English cliches, the pin-striped bowler-hatted stiff-upper-lip brigade who exist in a world so far removed from American enterprise and vigor that the hardest work they do is to avoid responsibility for any decision with an almost Brazil-type ability to pass the buck to another department.

And it is all done so beautifully. It’s not only the role of a lifetime for Nighy but his first leading role and he manages without once resorting to his trademark chuckle.

There’s no plot to speak off, just a gradual awareness by long-widowed civil servant Williams (Bill Nighy) that he has disappeared into a soulless existence, lacking any spark, easily matching the soubriquet “Mr Zombie” given by cheeky assistant Margaret (Aimee Lou Wood).

On receiving the news that he is dying of cancer, his reaction is to attach himself to livelier characters, Sutherland (Tom Burke) and Margaret, in the hope that by osmosis some of their joie de vivre will rub off, his attraction to the girl bordering on infatuation, which given the age gap, he luckily realises and pulls away from in time.

Unlike most downtrodden characters seeking redemption, he doesn’t immerse himself in a murder mystery, or race to someone’s rescue or confront the town villain, instead, almost secretly, devoting himself to building a playpark on behalf of downtrodden mothers who have no chance of beating the system on their own. In fact, there could not be a greater act of class rebellion for a middle-class Englishman than to connive on behalf of the lower classes to beat the Establishment.

His tiny action is against the background of a ruling middle- and upper-class who enjoy lives in the leafy suburbs far removed from the inner-city deprivation of London.

Screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day, 1993) – adapting Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) – has form exploring English emotional repression, with the most delicate of touches shedding a light on the incipient hierarchical pecking order. New recruit Wakeling (Alex Sharp) is kept in his place by the slightest touch of an umbrella. And in echoes of the inmates scurrying away from the approaching Nurse Rachet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Williams nearly hugs the wall, head bowed, hat in hand, to allow boss Sir James (Michael Cochrane) to pass in the corridor. Another colleague is “ashamed” to see Williams beg a superior to reconsider an adverse decision, as if this was not just a dishonorable action for Williams but a humiliation for himself to witness.

Only a hint here and there is required to draw other characters, William’s son’s harpie of a wife, and Williams’ colleagues not only forced to work at the same desk all day but crammed into the same (first-class) railway carriage for the journey home.

This could easily have gone down the more aggressive narrative route of Williams kicking up a stink and confronting those creating obstacles in other departments, there could have been stand-up rows, and defeat followed by celebration, but then that would have not been British. And while Hollywood might have revelled in the creation of another champion of the common man (or in this case, woman), instead director Oliver Hermanus (Moffie, 2019) has taken the much quieter approach, much to the film’s benefit.

There is only one directorial trick that will stop you in your tracks and a couple of lingering images, but the movie is all the better for the director restraining the impulse to go in more heavily.

Aimee Lou Woods easily makes the transition from television (Sex Education, 2019-2021) in an interesting part where her initial involvement as confidante turns into a more challenging role.

An industry, bewailing the post-pandemic absence of the older generation, will hopefully be sensible enough to accord this a platform release – word-of-mouth might even attract a younger audience – and come Oscar time Bill Nighy should be in with a shout.

Tag: Bill Nighy

Shelter (2026) **

Living (2022) ***** – Seen at the Cinema