‘Fuze’ is a throwback thriller with a ticking time bomb

David Mackenzie’s “Fuze” springs to life in a millisecond. In central London, a construction digger unearths an unexploded World War II bomb, and it starts to tick. The blast radius could be a half-mile wide. Outside the cordon, Chief Supt. Zuzana (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) oversees the evacuation of thousands of residents to Hyde Park. Inside the cordon, a military explosives expert, Maj. Tranter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), marshals his squad to disarm the weapon. Also inside the cordon, a heist crew headed by thieves Karalis and X (Theo James and Sam Worthington, respectively) uses the dangerous distraction to rob a bank.

Three skilled teams, three goals. Meanwhile, a displaced neighborhood resident named Rahim (Elham Ehsas) is cooling his heels in Hyde Park very aware of an evening flight that his family is supposed to be on. His clan will factor into the plot too, although his wheelchair-bound father flusters, “Nobody ever tells me what’s going on.” Join the club, old man.

“Fuze” was one of my favorite treats at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival, although unlike many of the other films it premiered alongside, it has no pretensions of being an awards contender. (Mackenzie’s 2016 modern Western “Hell or High Water” did make a moderate Oscar splash.) This is just quality popcorn filmmaking that spins the audience in circles as we watch experts do their jobs. I left the theater feeling giddily put through the wringer by its contrarian depictions of heroes and fiends.

A mechanical exercise more than a character piece, the script by Ben Hopkins (of the 2023 Willem Dafoe existentialist art burglar drama “Inside”) functions like an elaborate contraption. First, you’re impressed by the scale. Then, it reveals how its small moving parts fit together — and at the very end, just when you think you’ve clinched it, there’s a surprise coda that makes you unpack everything again to reassemble the story from a completely different perspective.

It’s a film with a few strong opinions about how the world is being run. Yet, they’re rarely said out loud. Everyone on-screen is a person of action, not words — particularly Taylor-Johnson’s major, a veteran of the war on terror, who is so calm under pressure that he’s introduced sniping a bull’s-eye at Lord knows how many meters. He’s the sort of character who tends to come across either bland or unconvincingly cocky-funny. Here, he’s compellingly focused on the task at hand and, like all the leads, never pauses to fill in the audience on exactly what he’s doing.

The performances are all from the grip-and-grin school of acting: neat and precise with a minimum of bluster. “Fuze’s” version of a joke is when an anxious underling pipes up to ask for permission to speak. “No,” Tranter snaps, and his gruffness is so confident that it makes you chuckle. Yet even he has a boss, Gen. Minton (Iain Fletcher), who storms into one scene to yank on Tranter’s chain of command and disrupt the power balance again.

Instead of bothering much about dialogue, “Fuze” is a blueprint of how stress and deference exert themselves upon a workplace. The robber clique turns out to have its own bosses, too, as well as the most visible fractures in their unit. You’d be correct to guess that within their grand scheme lurks at least one or two self-interested ruses run by either James’ Karalis or Worthington’s X. The other crooks don’t have names worth learning, but the actors playing them, Shaun Mason and Nabil Elouahabi, do have memorable faces.

There are no flourishes onscreen other than Matt Mayer’s editing, which is relentless. Mackenzie barely gives the audience a pause to ask questions, although he does get around to answering them (mostly). All this competence puts us in a strange state — a suspenseful trance — in which you feel on edge while also relaxing into the idea that the characters have things under control. Unpredictable twists are afoot. But the pace moves so fast that you can only observe, not outguess, the surprises, putting us in the same fix as a heavy, played by Dragos Bucur, who moans that he knows he’s getting screwed over, “but I don’t know how.”

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