The screen explodes with the title “Fuze”, underpinned by a pulsating house music soundtrack, and the blurring opening credits unfold at breakneck speed. Starting with such an astonishing pace might cause some initial confusion about the plot and its characters. However, the bare essentials are quickly made clear: there’s a massive unexploded device and these individuals must prevent its detonation. All else is merely decoration. The backdrop is modern-day London, where construction workers unearth what seems to be an untouched bomb from World War II during a routine job.
The immediate vicinity is hastily evacuated except for one specific group barricaded inside a nearby apartment. They draw the curtains closed and seem oblivious to the encroaching peril. The director’s approach thrives on forward momentum – rapid, sharp edits, perpetual camera activity, and an unrelenting musical score. The film shares some sensibilities with the fast-paced dramas Steven Soderbergh and a handful of others still dare to tackle.
If it had merely maintained this rhythm, it would have successful hit its intended mark. Regrettably, the screenplay trips over itself in the latter stages, piling on needless complexity and slapping on an ill-considered epilogue which ties loss ends that the audience already pieced together. These floundering final moments compromise on the tautness that had kept the narrative afloat until that point.
The director’s first venture into films, titled ‘Glenrothan’, was a disastrous effort which seems to have been possible due to some influential parties’ interventions. The main character, Sandy, portrayed by the director himself, resides in a quaint village nestled in the Scottish Highlands where he operates a whiskey distillery that has been passed down for 200 years in his family.
Around four decades back, Donal, Sandy’s younger sibling, amid a deep familial disruption, decided to abandon the homestead and carve out a new life in Chicago. In the Windy City, he emerged as a bar owner and performer, with audiences captivated by his rendition of ‘One Meatball’, exuding a distinct non-blues vibe.
Just as the film commences, Donal’s beloved bar succumbs to a tragic fire. Following the harrowing event, Donal, alongside his daughter Amy and her child, embark on a trip back to his homeland. As the film progresses, long-standing disputes and repressed grudges slowly unravel through reminiscing dialogues from their past, heavily laced with echoed effects.
Despite the presence of extremely proficient actors, the film’s weaknesses are glaring, most of them rooted in the disappointingly clichéd script and a director whose direction seems absent. The talented cast is left to grapple with the bumbling script on their own, twisting in the wind in the face of bad narrative design.
The screenplay’s most glaring problems are its heavy reliance on overused tropes or blaring exposition. The director’s approach is worsened by an overly sentimental score that fails to offer any hint of unpredictability or suspense around the film’s predictable conclusion.
In another movie titled ‘The Last Viking’, the narrative centers around two brothers dealing with the long-lasting emotional scars left by their abusive father. The film opens to the sight of one brother hastily stashing away a bag filled with ill-gotten gains into a storage unit. He entrusts his younger brother with the task of safeguarding the loot until he completes his prison sentence.
A decade and a half later, upon his release, he finds out his brother now identifies as ‘John’ – in honor of John Lennon – ignited by an advanced form of dissociative identity disorder. Even the slightest reference of his old name puts ‘John’ at risk of self-harm, almost becoming a recurring joke in the narrative. Worse still, ‘John’ cannot recall any information about where the stolen money was hidden, posing a significant setback to their plans.
The narrative of the film is peppered with offbeat humor and displays a knack for the absurd – both handled with a straight face, preserving a sense of sincerity and genuineness. Contrarily, the film doesn’t shy away from the grim aspects of the crime-centric plot, causing some discord in the overall tone of the story.
The violence in the narrative’s latter half seems out of place when juxtaposed against the light-heartedness that precedes it and the subsequent emotional turnaround. Despite these tonal inconsistencies, the film keeps taking curious turns, never straying from the central proposition voiced in its opening monologue: ‘If everyone is broken, no one is broken.’ As days go by, this idea seems increasingly true.
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