David Mackenzie’s Fuze begins with drone shots of London, which has some leftover WWII bombs buried underneath it. Ensuring everyone’s safety is policewoman Zuzana (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who enlists the help of some officers within the military. One of these officers is Major Will Tranter (Aaron Taylor Johnson), who orders an evacuation, clearing entire city blocks. And helping both of them is Zuzana’s assistant Clareese (Honor Swinton Byrne), suspicious of what’s actually taking place. Hiding in an apartment building, though, are a few men (including Sam Worthington and Theo James), probably criminals. They’re there because the apartment shares a wall with a bank with some safety deposit boxes they want emptied. Robbers, X (Worthington), Y (Shaun Mason) and Z (Nabil Elouahabi) are noticing Karalis (James) getting paranoid by the second. One of the building’s residents, Rahim (Elham Ehsas), needs to catch a flight, the bomb ruining his plans.

This is my fourth Mackenzie film (?), developing a gritty and pulpy style in depicting characters going through…situations. He also likes to work with different screenwriters every time, this time working with relatively obscure screenwriter David Hopkins. Hopkins’ screenplay has its share of profanities without them feeling out of place in a cops and robbers film. The characters’ words and actions make sense in Fuze‘s first two acts where viewers want both sides succeeding. It makes for a good decision to, without giving it away, the bomb to go off slightly early. Sure, it does feel a little low stakes that the worst injuries include just a few broken ribs. But then again, the officer who gets those broken ribs didn’t do anything wrong on an individual level. Regardless, the film can move on then to seeing if Karalis and X can get out of the building.

Aesthetically, Mackenzie and his DOP Giles Nuttgens make Fuze a decent looking film for theatre viewers. Yes, I write this with some bias because it makes time to show James and Taylor Johnson shirtless, etc. Do shirtless men fit in with a cops and robbers film, maybe not, but it fits within Mackenzie’s work. There’s always something butch drag about a body of work that includes modern cowboys, spies, and quasi-sympathetic criminals. Back to the writing though, a solid first two acts leads to a third that’s slightly tonally flimsy. The film give us two epilogues, the first of them showing connections between characters that I can’t give away. As much as I like to laugh, the comedy within that second epilogue gave me a tonal whiplash. As I write this, I like me a good deus ex machina, Aaron Taylor Johnson’s bum, and also both.

Film lovers can watch Fuze on select Canadian theatres.