It’s almost always fun when a movie hops genres, changing up the structure and tropes you thought it was operating under until you realize it isn’t quite the movie you started with any longer. This tends to work best in action pictures and thrillers because there are so many variants under that umbrella, and also a kind of built-in suspension of disbelief — there’s a reasonable expectation that things may get silly at any point. Such is the case with Fuze, a military procedural that becomes a heist movie, before again shifting gears and becoming a chase film.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson is Major Will Tranter, a bomb-disposal officer assigned to defuse what appears to be a massive unexploded WWII-era bomb unearthed at a London construction site. Meanwhile, the police, led by Chief Superintendent Zuzana (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), shut down the surrounding power grid and cordon off the area for the public’s safety. What they don’t know is that a group of robbers (led by Sam Worthington and Theo James) are using the situation to cover for a intended burglary; they’re planning to drill through the wall of a nearby apartment building into a neighboring bank’s vault to steal some uncut diamonds. The discovery of the bomb can’t possibly be a coincidence, right?
The first 40 or so minutes of Fuze follows Tranter in his attempts to defuse down the bomb, which takes the shape of a pretty straightforwardly suspenseful procedural, the nuts and bolts of the task proving sufficiently tense. First, he has to drain the surrounding ground water, but then it turns out, uh oh, this baby’s still ticking; and so it goes, on and on. Meanwhile, we are simultaneously given a view to the burglary as it unfolds, with the heist team trying to evade police safety crews and London’s thorough surveillance architecture. It’s only after both storylines go agreeably haywire that the heist becomes a foot chase, followed by a tense hostage situation and a series of double-crosses stack up on top of each other flapjack-style. It’s all completely ridiculous and built from a stunning number of coincidences, but also brisk and genuinely guess-making.
Director David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water, last year’s very agreeable Relay) seems intent on little other than building momentum and keeping it rolling. The action he orchestrates is unfussy but clean, and he maximizes his taciturn cast — particularly Taylor-Johnson’s rather narrow range — to both make up for underwritten characters and mask future plot twists. The director understands that he can’t stop to allow viewers to think about any of this for too long or the whole thing would crumble, and so he maintains the breakneck pace and places narrative curcilues around every corner. Thanks to this — excepting a truly baffling choice to end the film with an extended coda/flashback, one which reveals a backstory only previously hinted at that would have been best left unarticulated — Mackenzie mostly succeeds. Fuze ultimately lands as a tight and fairly novel little thriller, playful and narratively kinetic, a film destined to have a comfortable second life on the streaming service of your choice.
DIRECTOR: David Mackenzie; CAST: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Theo James, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Saffron Hocking, Sam Worthington; DISTRIBUTOR: Roadside Attractions/Saban Films; IN THEATERS: April 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 37 min.
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