Fuze Review
You might struggle to name a combination more classic than a heist movie and a ticking bomb. Such is the case here with Fuze, a new heist-thriller from seasoned action director David Mackenzie. This is a director who has produced a string of reliably gritty and entertaining crime dramas since his breakout success with Hell or High Water in 2016. Fuze, however, struggles to find this same footing, despite its slick yet predictable premise and high-strung tension.
At the centre of this tension is Major Will Tratner (a convincingly Northern-accented Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who leads a specialist operation to defuse a suspected World War II bomb discovered on a building site in Central London. As power to the area is cut off and local evacuations ensue, Metropolitan Police chief superintendent Zuzana (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) monitors the situation like a hawk, but not close enough.
Amongst the chaos of those scrambling for safety, a group of bank robbers disguised as London Water workers huddle in the underbelly of a block of flats, poised to pull off a considerable heist. With the powers-that-be now laser focused on diffusing the bomb, the crew, led by gruff, man-of-few-words X (Sam Worthington) and handsome diamond expert Karalis (Theo James), take advantage and drill into the basement of an Edgware Road bank. The timing is suspiciously perfect – it’s almost as if it were entirely planned.
Fuze doesn’t rely on much exposition to get the story going, instead choosing to drop right into the action, or, lack thereof, as London is held under the tick-tick-tick of a bomb. The worry of will it or won’t it explode does all of the heavy lifting when it comes to turning up that tension gauge, as does the frantic bank robbing happening under the nose of the Met Police. This gripping tension starts to dissipate in the aftermath of the bomb, however, as the criminals move their heist outside of London.
While it does maintain a steady level of intrigue on the whodunnit front, drawing in different suspects like flat owner Rahim (Elham Ehsas) and Major Will himself, Fuze struggles to keep up with its myriad of plot twists and converging storylines, and in a bizarre choice, uses its final scene to reveal an important historical connection that is more jarring than useful.
While there are some pretty decent performances here, particularly from James and his rather impressive South African accent, the cast struggles to make anything out of writer Ben Hopkins’ script. From stilted dialogue to strange one-liners (“all roads lead to Afghanistan”, apparently), there are moments of dialogue that, besides some well-placed jokes, might rouse laughs for all of the wrong reasons.
There is little to write home about in terms of visuals, either, which is a shame considering director Mackenzie’s usual flair for crafting stories that make good use of the cities they spring from. Here, London is flat and unremarkable in a way you might expect from a standard episode of evening TV. Much of the film feels this way, too. Fuze and its execution would be perfectly passable as a forty-five minute episode of TV, but stumbles over itself in its attempt to mesh with its big-screen runtime, unfortunately fizzing out quickly and fast in the same fashion as the bomb at its epicentre.
★★
In cinemas from 3 April / Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Theo James, Sam Worthington, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Saffron Hocking / Dir: David Mackenzie / Sky Cinema/ 15
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