This is totally a guilty pleasure – a slick, familiar thriller that doesn’t pretend to reinvent the wheel, but knows exactly what buttons to press.

Jason Statham plays a former special forces operative who’s officially dead, living off-grid on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides. He’s put his violent past behind him, or so he thinks – until it comes roaring back when he’s forced to protect his niece. From there, the film drops straight into a well-worn but satisfying groove: a good man framed as a terrorist, a conspiracy buried deep inside the state, and an all-out manhunt where the real goal isn’t justice but containment.

There are shades of ‘Léon’ in the set-up – the hardened loner going on the run with a young girl – and nods to the ‘Bourne’ films in the mechanics of pursuit. Surveillance is everywhere: Statham so much as walks past someone’s phone camera and, within moments, MI6 are alerted and a kill team is mobilised. It’s the kind of paranoia-driven plotting where ‘being seen’ is the same as being sentenced.

The first fifteen minutes are deliberately quiet. Statham is brusque, almost cruel, to the teenager he ends up protecting – but we can see the arc a mile away, and the film leans into it anyway: the thawing of the tough man, the reluctant guardian who will ultimately do anything to keep the child safe.

Like ‘Murder at 1600’, it hinges on that evergreen idea that the people closest to power are often the most dangerous – and that institutions will gladly destroy one decent individual if it means keeping their own secrets buried. Here, Bill Nighy plays the head of MI6 as the man holding all the cards, and the film is clearly steering toward an inevitable final showdown between the operative who refuses to die and the establishment figure who refuses to be exposed.

None of it is new – but ‘Shelter’ is efficiently done, and there’s something perversely satisfying about watching a system try to erase someone… and finding, to its cost, that he’s very hard to erase.