Shelter and Greenland 2 hail from the same action-thriller guru

Years and years of forgettable genre garbo earned January a reputation in Hollywood — a cold month for colder leftovers. But thanks to the likes of Gerard Butler and Jason Statham, plus a greater respect among the Letterboxd crowd for beat-’em-up superstars, the month has become something like Oscar season for action heads. This year, with Greenland 2 and Shelter arriving within weeks of each other, director Ric Roman Waugh has grabbed the crown of this reborn month. He is the king of January movies.

“I’d rather be the king of April or May and have a little bit of the weather,” Waugh jokes, but he accepts Polygon bestowing him with the honorific.

Even though his back-to-back projects are landing in January, neither of them are paycheck gigs. “They’re both films that are really dear to me,” he says. Greenland 2 let him complete the apocalyptic survival story of a family led by Gerard Butler, while Shelter, out on Jan. 30, began with an unexpected phone call from Jason Statham about a script the actor was “super passionate about doing.”

Waugh occupies an increasingly rare lane in the action world: He’s a filmmaker who delivers muscular thrills without abandoning moral weight. His films aren’t political manifestos, but they aren’t empty-calorie cartoons either. From Snitch (which confronts minimum sentencing laws with one of Dwayne Johnson’s most underrated performances) to Shot Caller (a brutal look at prison violence and institutional rot), Waugh has consistently aimed higher than genre expectations. How blessed we were when he took over Butler’s Has Fallen franchise.

“I try to make films that you feel,” Waugh explains. “The script has to grab me. It has to punch me in the gut. It has to have something to say.” Action, for him, is never the starting point. “If I’m not emotionally gripped, how am I going to convey that to you?”

That philosophy defines Shelter, a violent protect-the-kid thriller that functions — on the surface — as a perfect excuse to watch Jason Statham beat the hell out of people for 90 minutes. Underneath, it’s something more introspective: a story about exile, moral compromise, and the cost of doing the right thing when the system demands obedience. Statham plays Michael Mason, a former operative who defied orders from his Bourne-esque spy org, then vanished, only to be dragged back into the open when he saves a young girl on his lonely Scottish isle.

The film’s themes hit surprisingly hard at this exact moment, as images of lethal force deployed in Minneapolis by ICE and the Trump administration dominate the news cycle. Waugh can’t say it was intentional — the movie wasn’t shot yesterday — but the relevance is obvious to him. “As a filmmaker, I’m not trying to solve world hunger, bring about world peace,” he says plainly. “Hopefully what this movie does is, it entertains you for two hours, then it creates debate […] I’m never going to swing left and swing right. I’m just going to give you a subject matter, warts and all.”

Photo: Black Bear

Statham’s silent-killer persona sells the poignancy of an agent caught between duty and conscience (who will, for what it’s worth, still hurl a boat gaff into a gunman’s back if his friends are in danger). Waugh’s craftsmanship keeps the cat-and-mouse game totally watchable. For me, the experience of Shelter was like observing a veteran woodworker shaping something sturdy and precise from familiar materials. Waugh embraces that comparison. “I try to make films that are hands-on,” he says. “I like that metaphor!”

When Waugh talks about action, he homes in on authenticity and limitations — a methodology that seems derived from his days as a stunt performer in the 1990s. For Shelter’s island-set opening, he asked a simple question: “What’s our version of First Blood?” Rambo had the woods; Mason has cliffs, ropes, and boats. “I don’t think he’s pulling an RPG out of his back pocket,” Waugh says. “So what do you use to defend yourself?”

The result is a quintessential January action movie that leans hard on Statham’s athleticism — perfect for our new higher-quality era. Long live the king. “My biggest goal,” Waugh says, “is ‘be original. Be bold, live or die by your own sword.’” That was how his mentor Tony Scott did, and that’s how he’s going to do it.