Alfred Hitchcock’s most celebrated discourse on tension imagined a bomb going off under a table during an otherwise mundane scene. The audience is certainly surprised, but, hitherto unaware of any threat, they have not experienced any suspense.
But what if we knew the bomb was there? “In the first case we have given the public 15 seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion,” Hitch continued. “In the second we have provided them with 15 minutes of suspense.”
There is a lot of that in the opening act of this peculiar, starry action thriller from the reliable David Mackenzie. While kicking his heels in the waiting room for James Bond (perhaps never to be summoned), Aaron Taylor-Johnson, here convincingly Northern, turns out as a hardened bomb-disposal expert named Major Will Tranter. You know the type of fellow. He’s a loose cannon, a rough diamond, a wild card. But he gets the job done in a fashion none of the box-ticking jobsworths could even imagine.
Today that task is defusing a 200kg bomb, relic from the Blitz, which has just been unearthed on a London building site. Working from a script by Ben Hopkins, Mackenzie has some fun laying out the logistics of the official response to such a crisis. The area is evacuated. Barriers are erected. Chief Supt Zuzana, in the classy form of Gugu Mbatha-Raw, stands before one of those enormous video walls that now appear in all such depictions of high-end crisis management. Are they a real thing? Does the video-wall industry rub its hands at the arrival of typhoons or massed rioting?
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Anyway, the film-makers are faced with a dilemma. This isn’t a bad pitch for a half-hour episode of a TV show. But you can’t keep the bomb ticking – as it indeed starts to do – for a full 90 minutes. The audience is going to demand that something, somewhere blow up before their first visit to the lavatory.
With that in mind Hopkins introduces us to a band of villains intent on using the shutdown as an opportunity to rob a bank within the cordon. You don’t need to be any great genius to conclude, noting the level of planning, that the gang must have known the bomb would be discovered long before embarking on the heist. But how? Some class of conspiracy is afoot.
Mackenzie, director of Hell or High Water and Starred Up, is no Alfred Hitchcock, but he has a gift for the mid-budget, mid-brow film that once kept cinemas in profit during the slow months. With such entertainments now increasingly premiering on streaming services, it is cheering to welcome Fuze to the big screen before later relegation to Sky.
The film is very much a game of two halves (or maybe of a third and two further connected thirds). The opening section, focusing on the Luftwaffe’s unwanted legacy, combines enjoyable expertise and an irresistible ratcheting of bomb-under-the-table tension. Once that is out of the way we are left with a less compelling catalogue of cross and double-cross as the robbers make a break for freedom.
If you’re wondering what all that might have to do with the guy dismantling the bomb then you’re already on board with the film’s central narrative tease.
Cast in impressive depth – Theo James and Sam Worthington lead the heist – Fuze just about sustains interest over that often too-busy closing section. Mackenzie knows how to shoot a car chase and a gun fight. The screenplay blows it at the close with an absurdly clunky flashback that ties up every loose end with improbable neatness, but this remains a decent class of red-meat actioner for a now underserved audience.
In cinemas from Friday, April 3rd
