“Fuze,” the latest all killer, no filler thriller from “Hell or High Water” director David Mackenzie, that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday, is built around an ingeniously straightforward premise – an unexploded bomb, left over from World War II, is discovered on a London construction site.
While a bomb disposal unit, led by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and the London police, overseen by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, deal with potential detonation – evacuating the surrounding area, setting up a perimeter and attempting a dangerous defusing process – a gang of thieves, led by Sam Worthington, move in to rob a bank from the now-emptied premises. As one cop remarks driving through the site, “It looks like the apocalypse.”
The fact that all of this is introduced in the first few minutes of “Fuze,” which begins with a herky-jerky title sequence soundtracked to a garage remix of Ini Kamoze’s “World a Reggae (Out in the Street They Call It Murder),” speaks to the film’s ruthless efficiency in storytelling – it is unbothered by needless backstory that overcomplicates the action. The movie begins with the discovery of the bomb and the various players getting dispatched to the site (or in Mbatha-Raw’s case, overseeing it via drones and surveillance footage, from some crummy London office).
And, yes, in its contours and general demeanor, along with its complete disinterest in extraneous storytelling, “Fuze” resembles any number of 1990s action movies – the urban bomb disposal aspect from Stephen Hopkins’ wonderful “Blown Away,” the thieves-robbing-a-bank-in-the-middle-of-a-catastrophe antics of Mikael Salomon’s wildly underrated “Hard Rain,” the stoic heroism Keanu Reeves showed in “Speed” – the list goes on. But this is a feature and not a bug. The movie is designed to remind you of those movies, when stories weren’t tied into a grandiose cinematic universe and computer-generated spectacle wasn’t required to get an awestruck “wow” out of a Saturday night audience. (In “Fuze,” there’s a dazzling sequence where the thieves load up delivery drones with stolen goods. It gets your heart pumping despite being something Amazon delivery guys do now.)
“Fuze” is also a perfect vehicle for Taylor-Johnson, who often gets lost when he’s a part of bigger action vehicles but here is allowed the room to actually craft a character amidst the chaos. And Mackenzie, who directed Taylor-Johnson in 2018’s “Outlaw King,” knows just how to deploy him.
Like all of the characters in “Fuze,” unburdened by personal lore, he’s got to define his character largely through physicality. It’s in the way he enters and exits scenes and scenery, how he lines up shot glasses preemptively, for the eventual job well done and in remembrance for fallen colleagues (colleagues that, of course, are never elaborated upon). When Taylor-Johnson tells a subordinate he needs to be safe, there’s a quiver in his voice and his eyes are slightly wet. Is he remembering some undiscussed tragedy from his past? Or simply projecting how this defusal could potentially go wrong?
As “Fuze” ticks on, the narrative does become more complicated, but in a way that never takes you out of the story (or away from the edge of your seat).
At times, the movie, snappily written by screenwriter and novelist Ben Hopkins, threatens to widen and embrace a more rambling structure, akin to a 1970s disaster movie, perhaps. Why, for instance, are we so concerned with the inhabitants of an apartment building in the evacuation area and the immigrant family desperate to make their plane at Heathrow? And what’s with Theo James, as a squirrelly South African member of Worthington’s gang?
But mercifully every time the movie threatens to get too big or too sprawling Mackenzie tightens things again – criminals on the run, coppers on their tail and technicians desperate to save lives and spare property damage.
It should be noted, too, that the entire movie is scored, magnificently, by Scottish record producer Tony Doogan, whose electronic heartbeat acts as another ticking clock, ratcheting up the tension another unbearable degree.
This is only Mackenzie’s third movie since making “Hell or High Water,” which was nominated for four Academy Awards (including Best Picture). He was at TIFF last year with “Relay,” a corporate espionage thriller with Riz Ahmed, Lily James and Worthington, which started out incredibly before ending in something of an implausible muddle. As one critic put it, it might be the first movie that benefits from being stopped 10 minutes before the credits roll.
The same fate does not befall “Fuze,” partially because the movie is already operating in such a heightened, matinee movie mode already, but also because Mackenzie maintains enough depth and earthy characterization that even when the twists start piling on, the texture of the movie never fades away. You know very little about these characters, but you see enough through the course of the story to believe that they are real – the flintiness and determination in Mbatha-Raw’s demeanor, the steely resolve in Worthington’s implementation of a plan, the complex moral shading of just about every character – this is what makes you buy into “Fuze.”
And it really is a ride worth taking.
Mackenzie as a technician is unparalleled here, toggling between different storylines and locations and creating an easy visual flow between them, while also maintaining the geography of action set pieces, with an eye on spatial relationships between characters. Everything is easy to track and follow. Nothing is extraneous or confusing.
It’ll be interesting to see how an international film festival crowd will respond to a movie as streamlined and unfussy as “Fuze,” which is also on the hunt for an eager distributor. Those looking for something headier might be disappointed, but a movie this entertaining, with performances this richly drawn, is a rare feat and worthy of attention.
In short: “Fuze” is a blast.
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