Fuze: Review. By Deniz Arslan.
I had never really spent much time thinking about David Mackenzie. I mean, while I’m not a huge admirer of his cinema, I don’t dislike him either. His films simply never left much of an impression on me. Movies like Hell or High Water (2016) and Starred Up (2013) were generally good, but they never had any lasting impact on me, honestly. They were the kind of films I watched and moved on from without thinking much about afterward. They inspire neither admiration nor anger. Just a strange state of neutrality.
Last month, he came to Istanbul for the Istanbul Film Festival, where he served as jury president, and during that time he also attended the Turkey premiere of this film. I didn’t get the chance to attend that premiere, and I only saw him from a distance at the awards ceremony. So no, I’m not enough of a fan to make a huge effort to meet him or take a photo with him. And honestly, I’m also somewhere in between liking and disliking this film.
There’s something almost hypnotic, narcotic about both his personality and his cinema for me. I can’t feel anything. Truly. Neither positive nor negative. It’s as if all of his films function like a mildly sedative drug. You watch them, they end, and all they leave behind in your mind is a foggy emptiness. For some reason, I even associate him a little with the character Jasper, played by Michael Caine in Children of Men. (2006) He has the energy of an aging hippie who has detached himself from the world and quietly lives in his own corner. Anyway, enough rambling.
Fuze begins with the discovery of an unexploded World War II bomb at a construction site in the middle of London. People are immediately evacuated. Bomb disposal officer Major Will Tranter, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, arrives to defuse the bomb. Right in the middle of this chaos, however, a group of robbers takes advantage of the evacuated zone and robs a nearby bank. They dig a tunnel beneath it, break into the vault, and steal cash and jewelry. Most importantly, a huge bag full of diamonds.
Honestly, even that premise alone was exciting to me. A massive bomb threat sitting in the middle of London, and a bank robbery unfolding under its shadow… hell, even just the idea of an unexploded World War II bomb is already a good enough concept on its own. A genuinely strong crime thriller could have come out of this. And for most of its first half, the film actually makes you feel that potential. There’s constant time pressure. Chaos. Police everywhere. The looming possibility of an explosion. Especially in its opening section, the film’s rhythm works
quite well.
But after that, everything turns into complete chaos. The robbers think they’ve stolen a massive bag of diamonds from the bank, only to realize once they arrive at the safe house that the diamonds are fake. From there, the film devolves into a chaotic mess of betrayals where everyone keeps double-crossing one another. And as if that weren’t enough, it’s eventually revealed that a random civilian, the bomb disposal officer Tranter, and the gang leader all knew each other from Afghanistan years ago and planned the entire thing together. The film constantly keeps adding new information, new twists, new betrayals.
Yes, I understand it. I understand these kinds of narrative mind games designed to keep the audience alert and make the story feel alive. But this obsession with making everything excessively convoluted in order to create the illusion that your film is “smart” already feels twenty years outdated at this point. Especially in crime films.
Watching this many twists no longer feels surprising. If anything, it creates the impression that the film doesn’t trust its own story and is constantly trying to convince us that it’s good. It feels like the movie keeps nudging
you, saying, “Look, now I’m going to show you something new.” After a while, you begin to feel alienated from what you’re watching.
I think ever since Crash (2004), the moment I start seeing endless twists piled on top of each other in a film, I immediately begin to lose interest. Because most of the time, these twists don’t deepen the story; they merely complicate it artificially. Fuze does exactly that. The story never truly progresses; it only becomes more tangled. New information constantly arrives, but the film’s emotional or dramatic weight barely increases.
The interesting part is that even the film’s storytelling formula — and honestly its cinematography too — feels like something ripped straight out of the early 2000s. Those yellow color tones, that hyperactive editing style, all that desperate effort to constantly surprise the audience… You inevitably start wondering: was all of this done intentionally as nostalgia, or was this film made by people who have never watched anything beyond a handful of cheap early-2000s crime-action movies?
In the end, Fuze is a film built around an incredibly strong premise but lacking the balance necessary to carry it. While the bomb-heist tension in the first half is genuinely effective, the second half suffocates itself beneath endless twists, betrayals, and flashbacks. It never becomes truly intelligent, nor truly entertaining. And the strange thing is, David Mackenzie is actually a director capable of making good films.
Which makes it even more surprising that he made something this bad. Usually, when we call a film bad, we say so because of what it lacks. But that’s not the case here. The problem with Fuze isn’t that it’s missing things; if anything, it suffers from having too much. I really wish Mackenzie had trimmed down all of these excesses — the twists, the betrayals, the unnecessary connections — because there was already a solid story at the center of it.
A simpler, tighter, more effective thriller could have emerged from this material. As I said from the beginning, the film already has a good story. Fuze’s biggest problem is not that it’s stupid. It’s that it tries far too hard to be intelligent. In its current form, the film honestly resembles an overly salted meal. The ingredients themselves are not bad at all. Some of them are actually quite high quality. But after a while, the overwhelming taste of salt becomes so dominant that you can no longer appreciate the flavor of those good ingredients underneath.
