Fuze Review: Disposable UK Actioner Squanders a Good Premise

What if an unexploded WWII-era bomb was unearthed in the middle of London? And what if some criminally-minded folks took advantage of the chaos to do a little capering? The premise of this British actioner is a corker, at least, and it has in theory three potentially gripping staging grounds for drama, with the military ordnance specialists rolling in, police evacuating everybody else out, and a gang of thieves getting down to business while the city of Westminster is more or less abandoned. 

In practice, however, the many skips between perspectives have a somewhat dampening effect on director David Mackenzie’s attempts to sustain tension. And that’s despite Tony Doogan’s droning, forgettable score vibing “ambient thriller”; it’s like spa music to defuse a bomb to. Screenwriter Ben Hopkins’ characters are thinly sketched, stranding good actors with not great material (as the police chief leading the evacuation, the usually reliable Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Beyond the Lights) looks so stricken you want to suggest a lie-down) and doing nothing to save lesser actors like Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kraven the Hunter) and Sam Worthington (Avatar) from their own congenital blandness.

But the film gets better as it goes along, once it starts to slip off the yoke of self-seriousness to embrace its pulpier instincts. Theo James (Divergent) in particular emerges as uncharacteristically and amusingly weaselly, and with a plausible South African accent, to boot. “Plausibility” is not one of Fuze’s leading characteristics (genre clichés like the scrapbook full of newspaper clippings explaining a character’s motivation, on the other hand … ), nor is a firm hand on any moral compass, as witnessed in a laugh-out-loud coda that confuses its villains for heroes. Exuding direct-to-Redbox energy, Fuze has enough plot twists to make it watchable. You’re just not liable to remember much of it afterwards.

Fuze

2025, R, 96 min. Directed by David Mackenzie. Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Theo James, Sam Worthington, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Saffron Hocking, Elham Ehsas, Alexander Arnold, Honor Swinton Byrne.

⭐⭐

Rating: 2 out of 5.

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