I love a movie that gets right to it, and within the first minute or two of Fuze, a construction crew in the middle of London has unexpectedly unearthed what appears to be a live, thousand-pound World War II-era bomb, at which point they call the police and the bomb squad, and we meet all of our heroes who are going to try to take care of this thing before it blows up a few city blocks. On top of that, there’s now a group of bank robbers who are tunneling underneath the city, either taking advantage of the commotion above to achieve their ends, or having been somehow responsible for the whole thing in the first place. We can probably guess.
The first half of director David Mackenzie’s film takes place over just the few hours while this is all going on, and it’s riveting—Mackenzie keeps the action tight and continually moves us forward without us feeling rushed. We know what’s happening, where it’s happening, and what the stakes are. And what I loved most of all is that it shows us competent people doing their jobs well, and none of it relies on someone making a stupid decision, which feels rare in movies these days. The second half, things get messier, with the expected double-crosses and surprise allegiance shifts that probably aren’t really surprises, but this is all stock-in-trade for this kind of movie, and it’s still done reasonably well, so it’s understandable, even if part of us would rather stay in that fantastic first section.
At least this is all true until the last 10 minutes or so, when the movie makes a totally bizarre narrative decision and then yanks us kicking and screaming into a tonal shift that’s wholly separate from the entire rest of the movie. I have no idea what happened here, but I’d love to know what this was all originally supposed to look like. Still, before that, this is one of the better action thrillers I’ve seen in a while, and besides, it’s all about the journey, not the destination, right?
Right?
Fuze is in theaters.
