Fuze

The pleasure here is architectural rather than explosive. This is a thriller built on sustained tension rather than discrete set pieces; the viewer who arrives expecting the kinetic mayhem of a modern heist spectacle should recalibrate. The film is closer to a pressure system than a fireworks display, and its best stretch is the long build in which two operations grind toward each other while the audience holds information the characters don't. Giles Nuttgens shoots it glossy and clean, Tony Doogan's score keeps the pulse elevated, and Matt Mayer's editing does the heavy lifting of making four or five plates spin without smearing.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson anchors the thing with a quiet, coiled intensity, the kind of presence that suggests more going on beneath the surface than the script always bothers to dramatise. He plays a man with a soldier's past, and freed from an American accent he is more natural than he has been in a while; this is a good argument for his continued standing as an action lead. Theo James, as the heist's ringleader, works a relaxed and charismatic register that keeps the criminal side of the ledger watchable. Around them the ensemble is deep but unevenly used. Some strong actors are handed roles the screenplay never fully imagines, and you feel the shortfall most in the film's back third, when the machinery gets busy and the people get thinner.

That is the honest limitation. Fuze is a plot engine of real precision, and the closer you look at the plot the more you notice the characters were built to serve it rather than the reverse. Whether that costs you depends on what you came for. If momentum is enough, the film delivers momentum with skill and no wasted motion. If you need someone to hold onto while the clock runs, you may find the grip loosening as the runtime tightens.

What Fuze is decidedly not is a British crime caper in the wisecracking mode. It plays a straighter, cooler game and it is confident about the distinction. It also declines the shape the premise seems to promise, and it does so early, in a way that reorganises what the rest of the film is about. The film rewards walking in cold, and I'll leave it at that.

This is a smaller film from a director capable of larger ones, and it carries that scale without apology. Fuze wants to be a tight, twisty, professionally assembled genre exercise, and on that count it succeeds more often than it stumbles. Recommended, with the caveat that how much you take from it will track how much you require a thriller's stakes to be personal.

Now the open room, so if you haven't seen Fuze, stop here.

The structural gambit is the whole conversation, so let's start there. The marketing sells you a ticking-bomb movie. The WWII device at Paddington looks like the central premise, and then Mackenzie detonates that expectation at the end of the first act. What reads as the climax is the setup. I admire the nerve of concealing that in the trailer, and I admire the film more for it, because it reframes everything: the evacuation isn't the crisis, it's the cover. Once you understand the heist is the real engine, the paranoia of that strand becomes the thing driving the picture forward even as it gets unwieldy.

And it does get unwieldy. I'm with the read that the bank arc is the most unpredictable strand and the bomb plot loses its edge once its function is revealed. There's a version of this film twenty minutes longer with a cleverer late-game reversal, the kind that retroactively rewrites what you watched, and Fuze gestures at that door without quite walking through it. The pieces are all there on the board; the endgame never quite closes on them.

Here's where I want to sit with the central fault line, because it's real and I don't think it's fully settled. One camp says the pace and the plot machinery are enough; the other says thin characters make the stakes hollow, and points at Hell or High Water as proof that Mackenzie knows how to build tension out of people rather than mechanisms. I think both are right, which is the frustrating part. The comparison to Hell or High Water is fair and a little unfair. That film's tension came from two brothers and a tired lawman you couldn't stop watching. Fuze's tension comes from withheld information. Those are different pleasures, and the second one has a shorter half-life.

The casting critique is sharper than it first sounds. The argument that the calibre of the actors tips the audience off early is a genuine structural problem, not a compliment disguised as a note. When you cast faces this recognisable, you telegraph which pieces matter, and a mystery that depends on us not knowing is fighting its own marquee. I'd add the misuse of the bench: Sam Worthington reduced to a near-anonymous henchman is a waste of a specific presence, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw gets stranded as a police officer who spends the finale looking befuddled. That's a script failure, not an acting one. She's giving what the page allows, which isn't much.

On the dissent that it's simply boring, I part ways. I understand the charge that it's flat and anonymous, that it never capitalises on The Hurt Locker meets Heat, but I didn't find it inert. I found it cool to the touch, which is a different sin and a more forgivable one. Taylor-Johnson's PTSD backstory is a real problem, though: the film labels it rather than dramatising it, hands him a soldier's wound as exposition and asks his face to do the rest. He's good enough that it almost works. Almost.

Where I land: this is a confident smaller movie that would rather be lean and slightly hollow than bloated and sincere, and I respect the choice even when I feel the cost. The ending subverts the type, and the abnormality of it is the film's best argument for itself. If you walked in cold and got hit by the first-act pivot, you probably rate this higher than the plot mechanics strictly earn. That's not a flaw in you. That's the film working exactly as designed, which is also, precisely, its ceiling.