An unexploded WWII bomb turns up on a London construction site, and the evacuation triggeeds turns out to be cover for something else entirely. (released in theatres April of 2026. HBO Max September, 2026)
An excavator hits something hard under a London construction site, and it isn’t rock. It’s a decades-old WWII bomb, still live, still capable of leveling a city block. The police and military move fast, clearing out the neighborhood against a ticking bomb (literally), and for a while “Fuze” plays exactly like the disaster thriller its premise promises.
Then you realize the evacuation is the con, not the crisis. Somebody wanted this street empty, and the bomb was just the excuse to get there.
That’s the movie’s best trick, and “Fuze” knows it, which is why it doesn’t waste your time getting there. There’s no lengthy setup, no table setting before the good stuff starts. It jumps straight into the meat of the story and never really lets go across a lean 98 minutes. I was locked in from start to finish, and nothing pulled me out, which is rarer than it should be for a movie like this.
Theo James (the Divergent series, The Gentlemen) anchors the heist side of things with what might be the most convincing South African accent I’ve heard from an actor who isn’t South African. It’s a small thing, but it’s the kind of small thing that either sells a performance or wrecks it, and here it sells it. Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass, Bullet Train) gets the meatier role, the guy trying to talk the bomb down while clearly carrying something heavier underneath. You want to root for him, but the movie keeps a hand on your shoulder reminding you not to get too comfortable. Alexander Arnold, playing Martin on his bomb disposal team, is the surprise of the cast, an easy, likable presence who builds real warmth with Taylor-Johnson’s character over the runtime.
Not everyone gets that kind of showcase. Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Loki, The Morning Show) is stuck running the evacuation from a command post, the eye in the sky, and the role never asks much of her beyond competence. Sam Worthington (Avatar, Terminator: Salvation) fares worse. He’s fine, but there’s nothing in the part that feels written for him specifically. Swap him for almost anyone else and the movie plays the same, save for one odd character choice: he chews on a necklace through half his scenes for no reason the film ever bothers to explain.
Visually, “Fuze” doesn’t take chances. It looks like what it is: a streaming movie built for a streaming budget, competent and flat, without a lot of directorial fingerprints on it. The score does its job and gets out of the way. If you’re hoping for the kind of visual ambition that makes a bomb disposal thriller feel cinematic instead of just tense, that’s not what’s on offer here. It’s closer to “The Hurt Locker” crossed with “Snatch,” minus the visual swagger either of those brought to the table.
That’s a little surprising given who’s behind the camera. David Mackenzie directed “Hell or High Water,” one of the better heist movies of the last decade, and the moral shrug at the center of “Fuze,” where you’re not entirely sure the good guys deserve to win, feels like it’s reaching for that same territory. Writer Ben Hopkins doesn’t have the deep track record Mackenzie does, and it shows a little in how flat the dialogue can be between the twists. The bones of a smarter movie are here, but the film never quite builds to support its central idea the way “Hell or High Water” did.
Where the movie earns its stars is the ending, and I’ll be careful here because it’s worth going in cold. The last five minutes recontextualize everything with a flashback showing how Taylor-Johnson’s character and James’s character actually crossed paths, and it turns out Elham Ehsas (The Kite Runner), who shows up late as the foreign national tied to the heist, was there from the beginning too, working as a translator in what looks like the Middle East. It reframes the entire partnership at the center of the film, and it lands. The bad guys get away with it, and somehow that’s the version of this story that feels right.
“Fuze” isn’t going to be anyone’s favorite bomb disposal movie or anyone’s favorite heist movie. But it fuses the two better than it has any right to, doesn’t linger where it doesn’t need to, and sticks the landing when it matters most.
3.5 out of 5 stars.
