Photo: Courtesy of Roadside Attractions
Some movies are so eager to entertain that they refuse to let themselves be any one thing; they just keep changing shape. David Mackenzie’s Fuze kicks off in comically rapid-fire fashion, with brief, interrupted shots of various characters discovering … well, something. And its clipped cadence never really pauses after that. While the early scenes suggest that this will be a bomb-defusal thriller — a subgenre I wish we’d see more of — the film soon becomes something else, and then something else again. Frankly, it never really stops turning into something else, which can be a problem. But what holds it together is its fast pace and its sturdy cast.
There are at least three potential James Bonds among these actors, and each displays his own brand of curt, strapping charm. Chief among the familiar faces is Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the stoic, gruffly professional explosives-disposal expert Major Will Tranter, who shows up at a construction site in the heart of London where an unexploded, 1,000-pound WWII bomb has just been found. The entire neighborhood, which includes Afghan immigrant Rahim (Elham Ehsas) and his elderly parents, has been evacuated to nearby Hyde Park, and the cops, led by the efficient but slightly overwhelmed Chief Superintendent Zuzana (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), have set up a security cordon. Somewhere in those now-abandoned buildings, however, some figures stir in the darkness: A mysterious group of men led by the quiet X (Sam Worthington) and the industrious Karalis (Theo James), who are using the bomb evacuation as cover for a bank heist.
There’s more to the plot than that, of course, as Fuze jumps from twist to twist without ever settling down. (The movie’s trailer probably gives more away than you might want to know.) It’s an effective way of keeping us from asking too many questions. Wait, how did they know that the …? But why didn’t they just …? And when would he have …? Wouldn’t that be …? Silence, fool, I’m trying to watch a movie! Heist films are fundamentally ridiculous endeavors, and Mackenzie and screenwriter Ben Hopkins seem to understand that the faster they move, the more they can get past the more rational side of our brains.
The drawback to this approach is that assorted revelations and betrayals lose their power, because we never get too attached to any particular character relationship or plot development. Fuze is thin, and as such it goes down pretty smoothly: I can see it becoming a big airplane-viewing classic, and maybe, in the days when cable movies were still a big thing, it would have found its audience that way, too. But I’ve also come to expect more from Mackenzie, who broke through with 2003’s moody erotic drama Young Adam and achieved greatness with 2013’s intense prison movie Starred Up and 2016’s magnificent neo-western Hell or High Water. More recently, he made the incredibly absorbing, Riz Ahmed–starring corporate-espionage film Relay, which opened in U.S. theaters late last year. And while Fuze demonstrates much of Mackenzie’s technical abilities and his clear skill with actors, it does ultimately feel a bit vaporous. It’s a minor effort from a major director.
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