Shelter

Jason Statham is back, playing his prototypical glum nobody who's -- surprise! -- actually a killing machine fighting for a girl's life against the shadowy government forces he used to serve.

Give Jason Statham points for consistency.

The man essentially makes the same movie, over and over again. And audiences keep turning up for them, over and over again.

It’s basically a mix of Jason Bourne and Liam Neeson’s “Taken” movies. He plays a grim nobody, living out a bleak existence somewhere — a beekeeper, a lighthouse man, a driver, etc. But then his past catches up with him, revealing that he is actually a trained killing machine, and the people after him are the shadowy organization/government he used to serve.

Honestly, you could splice together scenes from his last half-dozen movies, present it as a new flick, and I doubt many people would even notice.

And yet it’s hard to deny the stolid entertainment value of them. They’re the buses of popular cinema, not especially original or flashy, but can be depended upon to get the job done. Popcorn movies, and don’t you dare think that’s a putdown.

In Statham’s latest, “Shelter,” he plays Michael Mason — though we don’t learn his name until near the end — a former Brit assassin who turned on his former bosses when they ordered him to do unconscionable things, even for a wetboy.

He’s been holed up for 10 years in a decrepit lighthouse on a rocky island off Hebrides, Scotland. His only companion is a dog he never even bothered to name. His only human contact, such as it is, is his weekly boat delivery of groceries and hooch, the latter of which seems to be the only thing he lives for.

The girl who totes the box up is Jesse (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), the niece of the trawler boat, who is curious about the crusty old hermit and tries to befriend him, leaving a tiny present with his latest shipment. He gruffly shoves her off, but then a storm scuttles the ship and he has to rescue her from the sea and nurse her back to health.

They spend time doing a typical tough-guy-and-young-girl dance: she’s scared of him, he tries to assuage her fears, he pretends he doesn’t really care about her, but of course he does, she starts to discover bits and pieces of his secret, he allows her in just a little, and just as they start truly bonding some black ops guys in night vision goggles show up with machine guns to take them both out.

It’s a classic conundrum from the “retired spy” shtick. The paranoid bosses in the spy palace learn he’s still alive, and send some guys to off him to tie up loose ends. Of course, the ends were already tied pretty nicely until they decided to interfere, prompting our spy guy to kill a whole bunch of them, with escalations back and forth, until he decides he’s got to ‘cut the head off the snake.’

Honestly, if I’m ever head of the CIA or some such agency and my people come to me one day to say, “We found Michael Mason/John Wick/Jason Bourne, he’s living in obscurity somewhere not bothering anybody, what do you want us to do?” I hope I’ll be smart enough to order them to leave him be.

The chief villain here is Bill Nighy, the MI6 chief who has developed a surveillance system called T.H.E.A. that basically hacks into every phone and computer system to spy on everybody, all the time. It’s become a sticking point in the upcoming election, so he’s forced to step down in disgrace, but really the prime minister just wants him to “get back in the shadows where you belong.”

Nighy’s always good for some deliciously prim and devilish line readings, and makes the most of what’s written (screenplay by Ward Parry) as a one-note part.

Naomi Ackie plays his replacement, who finds out about his plans to take out Mason and tries to thwart him. It’s a lot of scenes of people sitting in front of big arrays of computer screens tapping on their keyboard while they control the entire world. Daniel Mays is an old Mason chum brought in for an assist.

Bryan Vigier is the other super-spy brought in special to take on Mason, as Old Spy and Young Spy go at it in several terrifically choreographed fight scenes. Somebody else just goes ahead and makes the obvious comparison between Mason and the new fellow: “He’s him, 20 years ago.”

It would have been interesting for them to have a psychological component of their antagonism, but this is not the place for that sort of thing.

“Shelter” is directed by Ric Roman Waugh, who has made a lot of Jason Statham type movies without actually working with him before. He’s mostly been in the Gerard Butler business lately, helming both “Greenland” movies plus “Kandahar” and “Angel Has Fallen.”

I appreciated the slow burn of Mason and Jesse warming up to each other, and then he spends the rest of the movie doing everything to protect her, wading through troughs of bodies while doing so. Of course, she’d most immediately get out of danger by not being anywhere near Mason, but those are not the sort of subtleties one explores in Jason Statham movies.

And like buses — don’t worry if you miss this one; there’ll be another along pretty soon.