by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $13.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Theo James, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Sam Worthington, Elham Ehsas, Honor Swinton Byrne, Saffron Hocking
Intro:
… a stylish and stripped-down heist caper …
Fresh off solid if narratively muddled thriller Relay, director David Mackenzie is back with another high-concept offering.
An unexploded World War II bomb has been unearthed in the middle of London. And while Major Tranter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) leads the bomb disposal team to try and deal with it, Karalis (Theo James) and his team of bank robbers take advantage of the chaos to score some precious stones.
The narrative, as penned by Ben Hopkins, can be best described as ‘functional’. Mackenzie and his returning collaborators from Relay take their time to map out the technical details behind the work taking place on-screen, both with the bomb and breaking into the bank, and while the pace runs at a steady clip throughout, most of what’s happening is defined by action in the abstract, as opposed to the specific people doing said action.
The actors do well under the circumstances, infusing their ‘wait, what was their name again?’ roles with enough personality (and a few jarring injections of Guy Ritchiean snark) to keep things interesting, but they are more like pieces on a chess board than their own flesh-and-blood people.
Thankfully, the presentation is able to pick up quite a bit of that slack. Mackenzie and DP Giles Nuttgens bring a mood eerily reminiscent to the original 28 Days Later in their photography of abandoned London streets, and the soundtrack, from the jungle remix of ‘Welcome To Jamrock’ that blasts through the opening credits, to the ticking metronome laced into Tony Doogan’s compositions, helps keep the tension up.
Ditto for the set pieces, as the prolonged process of disarming the WWII relic makes for some exceptional nail-biting moments. While it’s tempting to compare the style here as similar to a Michael Mann feature (right down to a white-hat/black-hat confrontation in a bar that definitely feels like it’s reaching for Heat), its more considerate approach to an opportunistic disaster heist feels like a much-appreciated answer to the long-in-the-tooth bombast of The Hurricane Heist, or even the Dark Age comic pulp of the RZA’s Cut Throat City.
Taking this film as style-over-substance is an offer that works out rather well… for the first hour. Then, it’s as if the film itself suddenly remembered the sentience of its own characters, and not only do the twists start coming thick and fast, but it jams in attempts to flesh out the big players so that the later developments have some form of pull to them. And unfortunately, it’s so slapdash that it doesn’t really work. At best, it feels like a pale shadow of ideas that David Mackenzie had already explored (and with greater effect) in past works like Hell or High Water and even Relay. At worst, it feels like the aftermath of hasty rewrites, trying to retrofit reasons to care onto characters who, outside of plot function, hadn’t given much for the audience to chew on.
Fuze is a stylish and stripped-down heist caper that isn’t meant to invite much in the way of intense thematic analysis… which would be fine if the film didn’t feel so restless about that last part. Its approach to technical and atmospheric detail gives it some edge, and the performances are working overtime to give life to their characters, but outside of an interesting-enough way to spend an hour and a half, there’s not much to it.
