For those not intimately familiar with the topographical and historical minutiae of the UK, the relatively blasé way in which the British public react to the inciting event of David Mackenzie’s Fuze might seem a bit odd. An unexploded World War Two bomb is discovered on a building site in central London, and it’s a hassle more than anything, causing a headache for Chief Superintendent Zuzana (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) an evacuation of disgruntled locals, and the summoning of the army bomb squad led by renegade Major Will ‘The Thrill’ Tranter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). The rather subdued response to the bomb threat by all parties doesn’t seem so unreasonable when you consider that the Ministry of Defence deals with these leftover munitions on an almost weekly basis – it’s no wonder screenwriter Ben Hopkins thought he better add a little extra pizazz.
This comes in the form of a bank job, taking advantage of the local evacuation in order to drill a hole directly into the wall of the safety deposit vault inside an Edgeware Road branch. A crew of mean mugging men disguised as Thames Water – sorry, London Water – workers are responsible, led by South African/Maltese diamond expert Karalis (Theo James) and monosyllabic Aussie X (Sam Worthington) using the basement of local Rahim’s (Elham Ehsas) family flat as an in. And as if that wasn’t enough, there’s a whole arsenal of double-crosses lurking in the mud like so many undetonated German bombs.
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It’s the sort of schlocky fair that David Mackenzie has made his bread and butter in the past decade, most successfully in 2016’s Hell Or High Water (nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture). Unfortunately Hopkins’ script is less consistent than that previous heist film (written by neo-western magnate Taylor Sheridan), not giving the cast an awful lot to work with and choosing to save crucial plot information for the very last scene which gives Fuze a strange back-loaded quality. That said, James has a ball doing his best Afrikaans accent, suitably menacing as his tenuous control of the situation begins to unravel Fuze has a few tricks up its sleeve in that regard – as the plot unravels, it’s difficult to not root for the bad guys, as scummy as they might be, simply because they’re marginally more interesting. It’s less clear what accent Taylor Johnson is going for, or why Worthington looks flummoxed the entire time.
There’s also the question of why Fuze looks so lifeless. Perhaps Mackenzie’s regular DoP Giles Nuttgens has a vendetta against London, but if the drabness of Fuze was unintentional, it may well be a side effect of setting the film in broad daylight – at any rate there’s precious little sense of the earthy history that greets you down every alley in the capital. Even a dramatic race through the sewers feels like it was shot hastily so everyone could go and get their lunch. The resulting film is an uneven one – occasional flashes of intrigue are hampered by Fuze’s strange structure and uncertainty about how funny it wants to be. Although the 90 minute runtime is welcome during an age of ill-advised action film bloat, there’s not much good in a film being short if it’s also largely unremarkable.