Official Trailer
Rating: 6.4/10 | Genre: Action, Crime, Drama, Thriller | Runtime: 96 min
Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Theo James, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Elham Ehsas, Sam Worthington
So I watched Fuze last night and honestly, it’s a solid thriller that knows exactly what it wants to be. No pretension here. Just a tense 96 minutes about a WWII bomb found under London that needs to be defused before everything goes to hell.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the lead, and he carries the film well. The guy’s good at playing tense and worried, which is basically his entire job in this movie. He’s a military expert brought in to assess the bomb, and from the moment he realizes how unstable this thing is, the clock starts ticking. Theo James is there too as some kind of police liaison, and the two of them have decent chemistry even though they’re mostly just stressed out together for the entire runtime.
What Actually Works
The best thing about Fuze is that it doesn’t waste time. You get the setup, you get the problem, and then it’s just tension for the next hour and a half. There’s no unnecessary subplot about Taylor-Johnson’s troubled marriage or whatever. It’s focused.
The evacuation sequences are genuinely chaotic in a good way. You see the scale of what’s happening, the thousands of people trying to get out of central London, the police trying to manage a disaster. Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays someone coordinating the evacuation and she brings a lot of weight to scenes that could’ve been boring exposition.
There’s one scene where they’re moving through the tunnel system trying to figure out the bomb’s location and the sound design is excellent. The ambient noise, the beeping, the radio chatter. It builds this sense of dread that actually works.
Where It Falls Apart
Here’s the thing though. The 6.4 rating on TMDB seems about right because this movie doesn’t really have much to say beyond the immediate tension. Once you strip away the ticking clock, there’s not a lot underneath. The characters don’t learn anything meaningful. The disaster doesn’t really change anyone’s perspective on anything.
Sam Worthington shows up for maybe fifteen minutes as some government official and feels like he’s in a completely different movie. His scenes pull you out of the immediacy of what’s happening at ground level.
The ending feels a little rushed too. Without spoiling anything, let’s just say the resolution happens pretty fast after all that buildup. It’s not unsatisfying exactly, but it’s anticlimactic. You spend an hour and a half wound tight and then it kind of just resolves without the payoff you expected.
Fuze is basically a good airport movie or something you throw on when you want to kill 90 minutes and don’t need anything that’ll stay with you after the credits roll. The acting is fine, the tension works most of the time, and it’s not boring. But it’s also not doing anything you haven’t seen before. If you’re a big fan of disaster thrillers or Aaron Taylor-Johnson specifically, you’ll probably get what you need from it. Everyone else might find themselves checking their watch near the end.
Have you seen it yet, or are you thinking about whether it’s worth your time?
Where to Watch
Rent on: Amazon Video, Google Play Movies, YouTube, Fandango At Home, CosmoGo, JustWatch TV, Apple TV Store