Name: Fuze
Director: David Mackenzie
Genre: Action, Crime, Drama, Thriller
Released: 2026-05-28
Duration: 96 min
Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Theo James, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Elham Ehsas, Sam Worthington

Picture central London with the power deliberately switched off. Work lamps throw hard cones of light across a construction pit, fluorescent jackets move through the half-dark, and somewhere under the rubble sits a fuze old enough to predate everyone standing over it. That image, a great city dimmed on purpose and reduced to silhouette and emergency strobe, is where David Mackenzie’s Fuze chooses to live.

The setup reads like a procedural. An unexploded wartime bomb surfaces on a busy construction site, the military and the police order a mass evacuation, and a countdown starts. Then the film quietly moves the furniture. The blackout the emergency requires, the empty streets it produces, the attention it swallows: all of it turns out to be exactly what a crew of professional thieves needs. The rescue is the cover. The robbery is the plan.

Casting Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the man with his hands on the device is the film’s first argument. He plays Will Tranter as composure under a clock, the still point everyone else is arranged around, and that stillness is precisely what the thieves are counting on to keep every camera pointed the right way. Theo James and Sam Worthington supply the other kind of control, the rehearsed, low-voiced competence of people who have measured this building before. Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Elham Ehsas occupy the space between the two operations, where the line between who is saving the city and who is stripping it begins to smudge.

Mackenzie has built a career on men under pressure inside tight frames. The prison of Starred Up, the bank-job desperation of Hell or High Water, the mud and siege walls of Outlaw King: he likes a closed system and a character forced to keep working while it tightens around him. Fuze drops that instinct into a metropolis rather than a cell or a county, and the closed system becomes the cordon itself, the ring of police tape inside which the only people allowed to move are the ones with a reason, real or invented.

He has rarely been a flashy director. His films favour weather, faces, and the wear of real places over spectacle, which is part of why a blacked-out capital suits him. An evacuated city is a set you cannot fake convincingly, and the trailer leans on exactly that: wet asphalt under helicopter light, interiors read by torch beams instead of the usual gloss of a robbery picture, a skyline that looks switched off rather than dressed up.

The real subject is the dark

What the film is actually about is light, and what happens when you take it away. Cut the power to a capital and you do not simply open a heist window; you change how everything looks. The vaults that run on current, the cameras that run on current, the whole nervous system of a modern city goes quiet at once. Mackenzie and his camera team look most engaged by that texture, the photography of a place that has lost its glow, and by the way a crowd moves once the familiar grid stops answering. The ticking clock is the noise. The blackout is the picture.

None of which guarantees the trick holds for ninety-six minutes. Thrillers that hang on a single misdirection tend to spend their best idea early, and this premise opens a question it may not want to answer: if the bomb is staged, the fear of the bomb is hollow, and a film that admits its danger is a prop has to locate a real one quickly. There is a second tell in how little anyone can agree on what to call it. The picture travels as Fuze in English, as The Criminals in France, as Cuenta atrás in Spain, as Zona De Riesgo across Latin America, and, most plainly, as Ограбить Лондон, Rob London, in Russian. Some markets are selling the bomb. Others are selling the robbery. A film whose own distributors cannot settle on what they are looking at is worth watching to see whether it knows itself.

A small film carrying a big idea

The credited principals are Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Theo James, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Elham Ehsas and Sam Worthington, with Mackenzie directing a script built around the twin operations. It is a compact picture by design, an action-crime drama chasing the speed of a heist movie and the grain of a London procedural at the same time.

Fuze runs ninety-six minutes. It opened first in the United States in January and reached British cinemas in early spring, and it is now rolling out across international markets through the late spring and into summer. Whether the city stays dark long enough to matter is the thing the release is about to test.