Fuze adds another little gem of a film to under-regarded director David Mackenzie’s list, joining Starred Up, Perfect Sense, Relay, Spread and Hell and High Water as unusual takes on genre, often with a heavily procedural slant. Things click, click, click into place in Mackenzie films, though often the tumblers line up in unexpected ways.
Here, what looks like one sort of film quickly becomes another and then another. But things starts off in familiar territory, in the Paddington area of London, where a huge unexploded bomb has been exposed during the preparatory work for a new development. In come the bomb disposal guys, an army team led by the bluff, sweary Major Will Tranter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), with number two Sergeant Dootsie Keane (Saffron Hocking). On the civilian side the operation is being handled by the Metropolitan Police’s cool Chief Superintendent Zuzana (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).
The area is cordoned off and evacuated. As Tranter’s team – motto: “Don’t be shit” – go to work, Mackenzie switches focus to a gang in a nearby building who are ready to use the disruption to heist a bank. Did they somehow plant this bomb, which appears to be Second World War vintage? Or are they just opportunistically taking advantage of the situation?
The plot thickens as the hardware comes out. Tranter and co with their stethoscopes, clock-stopping magnet and hand drill, Karalis (Theo James) and his criminal gang with sledgehammer, boring drill, thermal lance, both trying to gain access to something without drawing too much attention to themselves.
Mackenzie and writer Ben Hopkins toss in a few more curve balls, most of them familiar – Tranter has a troubled past, Karalis and gang fall out – but the effect is of gradually shifting a story that’s all about precision and control to one that gets scrappier and more chaotic.
I was watching an old clip the other day of Roger Ebert talking about what people want when they go to the movies. They don’t want good films, he argued, they want OK movies, something that’s not too demanding. Fuze is that sort of movie – it’s familiar. But what lifts it is that it strokes us one minute and pokes us the next, switching things about, stirring the pot just enough. Its craftsmanship is top-notch, from characters that are thumbnail sketches brought to life just enough by a cast that seems grossly over-qualified for this sort of thing – Sam Worthington gets more to do later on as a gang member unhappy with his boss’s MO but for whole chunks of the film he just glowers. Mbatha-Raw’s police chief does little more than pull concerned faces and bark occasionally into a phone.
But Taylor-Johnson’s intensity suits the role, and Theo James again proves he can act when he has to.
As the plot twists and splays out, the film becomes a strange ode to the ad hoc, the randomness of life, no matter how much we try to control it, with the prizes going to those who can extemporise on the hoof.
A guy movie for guys, really, with not very much at all for the women to do. If you know London you might appreciate that it’s true to its geography – when the gang flee Paddington they drive out along the Westway, passing Portobello Road en route, as you do in real life. But there is a simmering theme about the procedural nature of the publicly accountable (army, police) versus the spontaneity of private enterprise. Which is food for thought if the joys of genre – this film’s real USP – aren’t quite doing it for you. I liked it a lot, though it didn’t grab me emotionally, not even a tiny bit.
Fuze – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2026
