If you thought that David Mackenzie’s previous film, Relay, was stupid, you haven’t seen anything yet. In his latest disaster, Fuze, Mackenzie, and screenwriter Ben Hopkins somehow screw up a tried-and-true pressure-cooker that should elicit strong popcorn thrills and not total bewilderment. However, instead of sticking to the film’s original premise, Mackenzie and Hopkins add new developments to the plot to make Fuze more auteur-driven when it should have instead stayed in the confines of a simple formula. The old adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” certainly applies to a movie that attempts to mess with a structure that shouldn’t, in any way, be meddled with.
It’s so weird to think that you need to add anything to “a still active World War II bomb has been found at a construction site, and soldiers have been dispatched in an attempt to defuse it.” Well, adding a bank robbery during the time when everyone is busy attempting to stop the bomb is certainly intelligent, and those stories will inevitably intersect. However, it’s in how they’re linked that Mackenzie’s film begins to make less narrative and cohesive sense, and will require immense leaps in logic for you to actively buy into what’s on screen.
Without giving anything away, just know this: Major Will Tranter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who is sent by the army to defuse the bomb, with as little casualties as possible, may or may not be connected to the story of Yorgos Karalis (Theo James), a bank robber who, with a group of nameless bandits (one of them is played by Sam Worthington), attempt to steal diamonds inside a highly secured vault. And if you thought the Deus Ex Machina of Relay contained profoundly strange leaps in logic, it will be very hard for you to believe what Fuze is selling once Mackenzie attempts to haphazardly link each character to the two stories being presented in parallel.
Hopkins’ screenplay genuinely treats the audience as if they’re stupid. Instead of each reveal feeding the overall story and culminating in an explosive (pun intended) conclusion, they actively undermine the movie’s simple premise and diminish our enjoyment of the work. In many respects, Fuze feels like the kind of low-rent Cannon Group trash you’d reliably find on a Walmart bargain bin, where all you have to do is turn your brain off and suspend your disbelief. You’d probably be able to do this if the movie didn’t change generic registers every ten minutes, starting off as a pressure-cooker, morphing into a heist film, a police procedural, and eventually a full-on historical reenactment of the War in Afghanistan, with so many plot conveniences one might find a new moniker than Deus Ex Machina to describe them.
Since each character (except Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s stern Chief Superintendent) has ulterior motives and withholds critical information from the audience, emotional attachment to any of them is incredibly difficult. If you’re introducing Major Trenter as a force who knows exactly what he’s doing and can undoubtedly keep his cool for the majority of the runtime, even when facing an old – and still active – bomb from the 1940s, I expect these traits to be developed, not entirely discarded once his allegiances shift and he becomes an entirely different character than we expect. The same can be said for Theo James’ Karalis, who starts off as a rather traditional bank robber and culminates in the most baffling turn I’ve seen from a usually reliable actor who, despite an inconsistent filmography, has always delivered solid work on screen.
With Fuze, he gives his first tangible misstep. His ridiculous accent hampers his performance, instead of enhancing it, even though his physicality still allows him to give a fairly compelling turn with his multiple variations of the facial expression ‘bewilderment.’ Taylor-Johnson and Worthington fare much stronger than him, because they’re given more to work with their characters’ ever-shifting parameters, even if they make little sense as the film trudges along to its laughable conclusion.
It would’ve been best for Fuze to only do one thing well instead of attempting a thousand different plotlines that overcomplicate its simple, yet effective, premise, but Mackenzie doesn’t seem interested in keeping things simple. Of course, the film doesn’t have the most original plot in the world, but some movies thrive in familiarity, especially if everything around the plot is done extremely well. Sadly, only two memorable performances and legible action save Fuze from being a total disaster, but it’s a complete far cry from what we’ve come to expect from Mackenzie, given how he’s conceived masterpieces such as Starred Up, Hell or High Water, and Outlaw King.
In a recent interview with Next Best Picture, Mackenzie rejected the term “director for hire,” stating that he’s always considered himself “an auteur. (…) I don’t regard myself as a director for hire, but as a director who looks for projects and takes them on. My attitude is very much not being someone for hire.” He might have been an auteur when he released the aforementioned films in the last paragraph, but Fuze definitely feels like the work of a director for hire, someone who’s completely lost their passion for filmmaking and is now solely working for the money.
Look, I don’t blame anyone. Times are tough. It’s hard to get by. One must do what’s possible to make ends meet. But Fuze isn’t something that an auteur would be proud of giving to the world, even for someone who works mostly within genre confines and has carved a niche in delivering films that are so distinctive from one another. Fuze certainly isn’t anything unlike what Mackenzie has done before, but it’s also not very good. Take that as you will.
Fuze is now in theaters.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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