'Fuze' Review: A Frenzied Bomb‑Squad-Meets-Heist Mashup That Outruns Its Flaws
Fuze, a white-knuckle thriller from Hell or High Water director David MacKenzie, is The Hurt Locker meets Heat. It’s as convoluted and daffy as it is propulsive and entertaining. In spite of its missteps and flagrantly televisual style, this is one of the most entertaining movies of the year.
Smack in the middle of modern-day London, a construction crew unearths a WWII-era bomb that’s still ticking away. As police race to evacuate the neighborhood, military bomb defuser Will Trantner (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) descends on the scene. Meanwhile, a team of career criminals (including Theo James and Avatar’s Sam Worthington) use the chaos as cover to pilfer a bank’s safe deposit boxes.
Fuze Is Flawed, But Still Exceptionally Entertaining
This is MacKenzie’s second film in less than a year, after last summer’s Relay. That was a tedious effort to modernize a ‘70s-era paranoid thriller, the centerpiece of which was minutely detailed scenes of characters mailing packages (seriously). Fuze is a similar throwback, primarily pulling its inspiration from ‘70s disaster/government conspiracy flicks and ‘80s action movies, but there’s considerably more life and purpose here.
At a sleek 92 minutes, Fuze moves like a bullet and contains more story than many longer films. (Take note, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy.) There are a lot of movements here, as McKenzie and his ace ensemble cast (including Gugu Mbatha Raw and Honor Swinton Byrne) manage to contort and reinvent the picture right up until the conclusion. It makes for a wonderfully eclectic viewing experience, even if the tonal changes aren’t always assured. The placement of the final scene is frankly puzzling, and jaunty text over the end credits detailing what came of major characters feels at odds with the lack of comedic relief elsewhere in the picture.
Frustratingly, MacKenzie has yet to make a picture that matches the promise of his debut, the brilliant bank robbery thriller Hell or High Water (2016), but the issues with his films rarely seem to be a fault of the direction. In the case of Fuze, a more stylistic approach would’ve better illustrated the story’s kinetic, punk-rock energy (one would love to see what someone like Danny Boyle might’ve done with this material); and there could have been a few more polishes of the screenplay to refine the extremely uneven third act.
But it shouldn’t be discounted that Fuze is immensely entertaining, even while you must acknowledge how incredibly silly it all is. (This is, after all, the sort of movie in which the villain keeps a scrapbook detailing their motivation.) In the first four months of 2026, there have been about a dozen completely dull and lifeless genre movies — Scream 7, Ready or Not 2, They Will Kill You, the aforementioned Mummy — that fail to inspire even a modicum of thrill or titillation. Imperfect as it is, Fuze never once tempts you to check your phone or take a stroll to the concession stand. The prevailing sentiment as the credits roll is that McKenzie is a consummate director of thrills and a promising student of genre cinema. One day, probably very soon, he’ll make his masterpiece.