Joel on Film

It is essentially impossible to assume that we might know what’s coming in Fuze after reading a short synopsis of the story that screenwriter Ben Hopkins has devised. At the start, it’s about a moment of panic for the population of an affluent London neighborhood when an unexploded bomb, relic of World War II, is discovered buried a few feet underground and right in the middle of a construction site. How did the bomb get there, is the fuse still active, and when might it detonate?

Those are the three most important questions that must immediately be addressed by a bomb disposal military unit, led by Will Tranter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and London’s metro police department, led by Zuzana Greenfield (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). The movie, though, quickly reveals itself to be an old-fashioned potboiler, because Hopkins has loaded this seemingly simple scenario with so many twists and subversions of our expectations that’s hard to know where to begin. Indeed, it’s even a little bit difficult to know how to talk about this movie.

Some answers to the questions not specified so far in this review are, obviously, going to be more interesting than others, but right until a thoroughly misjudged epilogue (that actually serves as a flashback to events that inform what we had just seen), it’s a breath of fresh air to be constantly wondering what trick Hopkins will pull out of his pocket next. Perhaps the best way to address the actual plot of this movie, while trying to preserve those surprises, is to lean into it. In that case, let’s just say that the bomb plot keeps time with another thread, following a group of jewel thieves who use the ruckus developing outside as a cover to rob a bank vault.

The criminal group is led by Karalis (Theo James), who hails from South Africa, and otherwise includes three nameless accomplices—credited as “X” (Sam Worthington), “Y” (Shaun Mason) and “Z” (Nabil Elouahabi)—and a lot of planning about how to evade detection and arrest. How they relate to an unexploded bomb found in the middle of London, though, is a discovery that must only be made sitting in the theater seat, though. Needless to say, very little here is as it seems, but the degree to which it is not what it seems to be is quite surprising.

At the bomb site, Tranter—who was a sharpshooter during his service, before some events in Afghanistan led to a psychiatric evaluation—is calm and collected, important qualities of a man put in charge of making sure that bomb doesn’t go off. He’s given the coordination of fellow corporals (including one, played by Alexander Arnold, who makes a startling discovery) and his EOD team, who plot exactly where to establish protective barriers. At a certain point, though, Hopkins and director David Mackenzie are sort of required to move past this part of the film’s plot, which is essentially where all discussion should cease.

What follows is a chase movie of sorts, as our wholesale understanding of the details of the plot are reconfigured with a certain amount of glee by the filmmakers. It starts with the actors, some of whom play characters who only seem to be functional cogs in the machine. We learn during the evolving final act that, in fact, the nature of those performances is quite different from what we assumed, just as various loyalties are tested or redefined and the pieces of the initial mystery scream for reevaluation.

If it sounds like Hopkins is saying something of value with this movie, well, he isn’t: It’s a thriller whose parts remain fairly basic, even as a labyrinth is constructed of those parts, and the characters only mean anything as it regards the various twists of the second and, especially, third acts. One fair reading of those twists might be that the movie loses the plot entirely and veers toward silliness. There is the quality of a brutal reality check, though, that makes these surprises cruelly ironic and especially devious.

Sometimes, that’s more than enough to push past any fundamental issues of rather limited storytelling, and it ultimately does make up for what is, again, a sizable misstep right at the end, which assumes we both need and want the useless bit of information that it spoon-feeds us in order to gain deeper understanding of what came before. The rest of Fuze, though, is an engaging and twisty thriller.

Rating: *** (out of ****)