Honestly, this movie had me paying attention from the beginning...
Imagine waking up one morning and finding out that somebody has discovered an unexploded bomb in the middle of London...
The whole area gets evacuated.
Police everywhere..
Military everywhere..
People are running around trying to stay safe and while everybody is busy worrying about the bomb...
A group of criminals are like.. “Perfect. Let's rob a bank.”
That is basically the setup for Fuze and I have to admit, I liked the idea immediately..
Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Major Will Tranter, a bomb disposal expert brought in to deal with the dangerous device.. At the same time, Theo James plays Karalis, who is leading a group of criminals carrying out a carefully planned bank heist while the city is distracted by the supposed WWII bomb..
So you've got two operations happening at the same time... One group is trying to stop an explosion, Another group is trying to make millions and everybody is working against the clock... That alone was enough to keep me interested..
What I liked most about Fuze is the way it moves between the two stories..
One minute you're watching Tranter and his team carefully working around the bomb, and the next you're underground with the criminals trying to get into the bank...
There is this constant feeling that something is going to go wrong and trust me... Something ALWAYS goes wrong.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson was good in this.. His character isn't the loud action hero who spends half the movie giving motivational speeches... He's actually quite calm and focused, which I appreciated...
He looks like a man who has dealt with dangerous situations before and doesn't have time to panic..
Theo James also brings a different kind of energy.. His character is more mysterious and calculated, and I enjoyed watching him because you never completely know what he's thinking..
Then there's Gugu as Chief Superintendent Zuzana...
She doesn't get as much room as I would have liked, but she does a good job as the police officer trying to understand what is actually happening while everyone else is running around with half the information.
As the movie continues, things start becoming more complicated than they really need to be.
There are twists, then another twist, then you discover that something you thought was happening isn't actually what you thought, then somebody has another secret... Then another plan..
The movie wants to be suspenseful, and sometimes it succeeds but other times I could see where things were going... Some of the twists didn't surprise me as much as the movie probably wanted them to.
I also felt that the characters could have been developed a little more..
We know what these people are doing, but I didn't always feel like I knew WHO they were..
The action is good, though..
The bomb sequences are probably my favourite parts because there's something naturally stressful about watching people work around an explosive device while knowing one mistake could end everything and the heist itself is nicely put together.
It's not the biggest or most spectacular robbery I've ever seen, but it feels practical and old-school...
That's actually how I would describe Fuze overall... Old-school..
It reminded me of those crime thrillers where the movie doesn't need superheroes, massive CGI explosions or a hundred cars flying through the air... Just give us a plan, a ticking clock, some criminals, some police officers and one thing that can blow everybody up... Simple..
Well... Simple until the movie starts adding more layers.
I also liked the runtime... At around 96 minutes, Fuze doesn't waste too much time..
Even when the story becomes complicated, it keeps moving and that's important because a movie like this can easily become boring if it spends too much time explaining every little thing...
Rating: 85/100
