By Fiorela Gonzales

Fuze is an action/thriller that starts off as a bomb movie and turns into a heist movie where everyone double crosses each other and nobody learns anything. It’s a fun action movie with high stakes that keeps you locked in hoping no one gets blown up while simultaneously blowing up its own ending.

The movie starts off at a construction site in London where an unexploded World War 2 bomb is discovered. Immediately, the area is cordoned off by the police, and the military bomb unit is brought in to defuse the bomb under the command of Major Will Tranter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). As the area is evacuated, Rahim (Elham Ehsas) and his non-English speaking family leave their apartment building that is located behind a bank. Once the area is empty, a group of men who did not evacuate the area drill into a bank from inside the basement of Rahim’s building. The team of robbers is led by Karalis (Theo James) and helped by team members Z, Y, and X (played by a rare non-blue Sam Worthington). Once inside the bank, they break into all the safety deposit boxes, and Karalis specifically goes to one and takes a mysterious package out of it.

On the construction site a lower military member Martin (Alexander Arnold) discovers an anomaly with the bomb as it looks like a small part may not have fully rusted over which wouldn’t make sense for a WW2 era bomb. The bomb begins to tick, the police discover Karalis near the back of the bank, and as a police chase begins, the bomb goes off, causing chaos, but no casualties at the bomb site. The robbers make it out, and it’s revealed that the mysterious package Karalis took contains uncut diamonds. Karalis double crosses his team for his cousin, but his cousin double crosses him, and throughout all these double crosses, multiple twists are unearthed, which leads to a completely confounding and bewildering ending.

Throughout the first two acts of the film, it’s very tense and exciting, and as new information is discovered you’re pulled along to the mystery, wondering who knows what and who’s involved. It’s a fun game to play, and you’re wondering throughout “how are they possibly going to land the finale” and boy do they not. They actively bomb (no pun intended) their own ending. The movie wants to be Guy Ritchie’s Snatch (2000) but without the silliness of it, so it’s bewildering when for 90 minutes the movie is tense and high stakes and then the last couple of minutes they go silly mode. There’s a “where are they now” ending that makes no sense for the type of film we just watched, including a joke that comes so far out of left field from everything we saw in the movie about a character. The ending makes it seem like they were trying to do an Ocean’s Eleven (2001), but they didn’t have any of the charismatic characters you get to know and root for. The movie ends with a flashback of how the main group of characters met that feels like a last-minute dump on because someone realized that we never learned enough about the character to care about why the movie should end the way it does.

Aside from the bewildering ending, there’s also no character arcs. A twist does not constitute as a character growing or learning anything just because we learn who they really are. They are who they are at the end just as they were at the beginning, it’s just the audience who learns about it for the first time. There are also a few characters in the movie that you think are going to have character arcs, like Chief Superintendent Zuzana Greenfield (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who is involved with the bomb and the bank heist throughout and makes all the calls for the movie. Yet when the true nature of what is happening and who is behind it is discovered, she fizzles out into the background without so much as anything said about it. There’s also the lower-level military man, Martin, who is played as meek and nervous but ultimately is the one that catches the anomaly and pushes for investigation. His character felt like it was being led to have a full growth and be part of the ending, but he’s also left in the bomb-detonated dust.

The first 80 minutes of this movie are fun, tense, high stakes, heist/bomb movies, and then somehow drop that for an ending that doesn’t make sense for its film. It feels so patched on that there are moments when it suddenly feels green-screen adjacent, which the rest of the movie does not, that I do have to wonder if it genuinely was a last-minute addition after the film was locked. Tone shifts in a movie can work, but only if the characters of the story work within that shift. And we get no growth, and we never really learn about them, so the tonal shift feels cheap. It’s a fun movie, and I’d be lying if I didn’t get locked in throughout the heists and escapes and double crosses. The ending is also so bewildering that it made me laugh (not necessarily a good thing for the film), but I can’t say I wasn’t entertained.

3 stars.