Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is back in Canada this week covering the 50th Toronto International Film Festival. And as usual, we wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing 2025 coverage, get rolling with our official curtain-raiser, and revisit the complete Vanyaland coverage archives from past TIFF editions.
Color me thoroughly satisfied by David MacKenzie’s Fuze, which lays out the pieces of a genuinely great idea for a film at its start and proceeds to construct it with admirable precision over the course of 98 minutes. Trust me, when you have a runtime like that at a festival like TIFF, you shout hosannas when it’s actually as economical as it says on the tin, so consider this a “hallelujah.” Is it slight? Sure, but when you’re white-knuckling through the twists and turns of this better-than-average heist picture, I don’t think you’ll really give a shit.
Boasting a swell ensemble cast and a somewhat surprising narrative structure, it’s his strongest work since Hell or High Water precisely because of how smart the setup is (oh, Relay, how close you came to glory). Now, don’t get me wrong: There’s some dumb shit that happens every once in a while – characters get zapped with the “temporary stupidity” ray gun from off camera and forget that, for instance, there’s an emergency release inside of most trunks nowadays or that generators give off heat signatures. But I was on board the minute what looked like a London Hurt Locker transitioned into a feature Guy Ritchie would envy.
Fuze has several vantage points (and, like Vantage Point, one has Sam Worthington involved). Our first is from the Metropolitan Police, called after some construction workers discovered an unexploded German bomb from the Blitz in the soil of their job site. After ordering an evacuation of the area, the superintendent (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) calls up the military, who immediately summon the bomb squad, led by a hyper-competent Major (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, making his case to be in a version of The Ipcress File instead of being the next Bond), our second perspective.
Among those fleeing is our third window into the situation, an Afghan immigrant (Elham Elsas) and his family, who were getting ready for vacation when the day went topsy-turvy. And in a darkened room inside one of the buildings – one right above a bank branch – sit six men, waiting until the police leave to emerge. After the Police hand over the situation to the Army and cut the power to the area, the Major’s team notices their leader is somewhat more jittery than usual. It’s not like he hasn’t done jobs like this before or under worse circumstances (like, you know, an active warzone) – they chalk it up to memories of comrades lost in Afghanistan or nerves.
As they begin their work, far away from the safety park where the Afghan family sits and bickers about whether or not they’ll make their flight, the gang of six descends the stairs and preps for their own labors. Disguised as sewer-bound sanitation workers, they begin a complex heist in the cover of darkness, seemingly aware that there was a long-buried bomb underneath the apartment complex going up next door. As the two teams get to work, strange things begin to happen. A fox, of all things, nearly blows the crooks’ cover. A bomb technician notices that the metal is a little less corroded than it should be – shouldn’t it be rustier, given its age? Why is one of the bank robbers so concerned with a specific safety deposit box? Why is that garbage bin so hot when the police drone looks at it? Right as the cops begin to catch on, the bomb detonates, showering the neighborhood with dust. It’s a miracle no one there was killed that day. Well, scratch that. It’s a miracle no one was killed in the blast. As the criminals flee, the threads begin to converge, double-crosses occur, and bodies hit the floor.
The idea of using unexploded ordinance from WWII as cover for a heist is truly clever, though you know it’s going to be much more involved than it seems at first blush. What’s truly smart is the way that Mackenzie glides you through the twists and turns of this complex plot in as little time as possible, and believe me, it gets quite muddled as the situation evolves. It never gets confusing, though our characters’ motivations are often out of reach, culminating in an “a-ha” moment near the end that almost certainly guarantees I’ll watch it whenever it makes its way to general audiences. The cast is well-assembled, though they can be a little faceless if not directly involved in the plot. They’re game enough to look as confused as the rest of us, or as nervous as they can be, if they’re not shitting their pants with anticipation.
I’ve come to accept Mackenzie’s tendency to throw twists at us as a flourish, and the fact that this comes to a clean resolution supported by the narrative is more than enough, given the filmmaking’s thorough competence. His edit resembles the work of one of the teams in Fuze itself – not without the occasional error, but it gets the job done strongly, coming out the other side with a dumb grin on its face.