David Mackenzie is not especially known as a director of silent movies. In fact, Hell Or High Water, his Oscar-nominated sleeper hit and probably the Scottish director’s best-known film in America, has plenty of satisfying dialogue for actors Chris Pine, Ben Foster, and Jeff Bridges to savor, in a screenplay by a pre-empire Taylor Sheridan. But other Mackenzie pictures from throughout his 25-year career do impose some memorable limitations on chatter, like the unnerving quiet of his early film Young Adam, or last summer’s tense thriller Relay, which featured a watchful and soft-spoken Riz Ahmed protecting whistleblowers by refusing to talk to them directly. That’s the kind of silence Mackenzie brings to the new genre workout Fuze: Not complete, not rigorous, but a clear comfort with passages of low-exposition, minimal-dialogue procedure.
For an extended period of Fuze, Mackenzie actually cuts between two different procedures, one with a clearer goal than the other. When construction workers discover an unexploded bomb in Central London, Major Will Tranter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his team arrive to defuse it as the surrounding area is evacuated under the supervision of Chief Superintendent Zuzana (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). Meanwhile, Karalis (Theo James), a man known as X (Sam Worthington), and a few more accomplices spring into action and use the cleared-out flat of Rahim (Elham Ehsas) and the empty surrounding streets as an opportunity to tunnel into a nearby bank and make off with money and jewels. It quickly becomes obvious that they’re too well-prepared for this to be a spur-of-the-moment decision.
Fuze holds off on explaining exactly how and why these things are happening, not really out of suspense but out of the pleasure of watching characters start to figure things out for themselves. The editing in this early going is razor sharp, never holding on scenes or characters longer than necessary, but never antsy in its desire to cut away. The headlong momentum almost functions as its own form of exposition. If the movie cuts, then it must have just delivered its information.
In this context, a bunch of leading-man also-rans are sculpted into an ensemble of dependable, no-fuss crime-picture blokes. It’s not that Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Sam Worthington, and Theo James haven’t been good in other films. Worthington, in fact, did similarly effective work in Mackenzie’s Relay. But Fuze offers further proof that whatever charisma shortcomings they may have in bigger-budget vehicles (Worthington’s stellar Avatar mo-capping excepted) don’t apply to a more compact, muscular thriller—at least for its fairly riveting first half or so.
Fuze doesn’t fly off the rails at its midpoint. It keeps moving forward at a steady clip. By its final stretch, however, the effort to sustain itself becomes more visible, and less quietly confident. The problem with bringing both plots to a boil so efficiently is that the mere act of lingering with them quickly telegraphs some further twists. The screenplay also feels increasingly desperate in a search for ways to impart information that ultimately isn’t all that interesting. In the process, the filmmakers dip into some hoary devices, like the neatly clipped and collected newspaper articles (in the 21st century?) that one character comes across that might as well be labeled “My Motivation Scrapbook.” (Poor Mbatha-Raw spends a lot of the movie gawking at these sorts of revelations and receives little resolution for her trouble.) Most structurally unsound is an extremely late-breaking action sequence that’s supposed to be wracked with tension. Anyone aware of the film’s 97-minute runtime will recognize it as oddly placed, while those less conscious of its timing will shortly be baffled by one of recent history’s most abrupt cuts to credits.
At that moment (which, granted, is about the last possible second), the movie’s confidence suddenly feels misplaced: Is this a completely different sort of picture than the taut procedural we’ve been watching for most of the past hour and a half? Did the filmmakers attempt to graft some greater sense of resonance onto Fuze at the last minute, or was a bunch of material cut for the sake of streamlining? These questions don’t hang around too long, because most of what’s here works as unfussy entertainment. But Mackenzie does nearly talk himself out of a perfectly fine, compact thriller.
Director: David Mackenzie
Writer: Ben Hopkins
Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Theo James, Sam Worthington
Release Date: April 24, 2026