Search any streaming service and you see them.
Comedy, horror, romance (especially romance), zombie or sci-fi. By the dozens. Hundreds?
Movies you’ve never heard of starring people you’ve never heard of (except for the one guy you’ve heard of and that one guy is usually Bruce Willis). They proliferate in every section of Netflix and Amazon Prime. Content. Nothing more, nothing less. Produced solely to fill the endless, gaping, fiery maw of online content libraries.
Most of them are, to put it kindly, so-so. If I’ve learned anything from Red Letter Media, low-budget sci-fi means one or two FX scenes followed by endless wandering through a forest and/or desert.
And it’s usually set in southern California.
The dramas and romances are capably filmed and acted, but they’re still not very interesting. The comedies are painful and the horror is interchangeable.
Every once in a while a movie sneaks through that’s better than it has any right to be, with a cast you can’t believe is actually in this movie.
“FUZE,” now streaming on HBO Max (or whatever they call it now) is that kind of movie. First, the cast – Theo James (“The Gentlemen”), Sam Worthington (“Avatar”), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (“Avengers: Ultron”) and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (“Black Mirror”).
You wouldn’t be surprised to see them in leading or supporting roles in top-tier studio flicks, as many of them have done. But in a straight-to-video HBO Max salary dump? Hardly. (Okay, officially “FUZE” did receive a theatrical release and netted about $4 million globally, so… it’s an honorary straight-to-video release?)
And, aside from an excellent cast, the movie has a better plot than you’d expect, including a couple of decent twists.
Coming to Blu-ray via Sony on 7/7
Fuze (2025) https://t.co/8ZOkxmWzrr
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Buy Physical Media
A construction crew unearths an unexploded bomb from WWII as they excavate a work site in Paddington (no bears were harmed in the production of this review), which scrambles the local (?) unexploded ordinance unit, led by Taylor-Johnston, to lock down the surrounding area. This displaces the tenants of the apartment building next door, including an Afghan family who seem unimportant but who our camera keeps returning to so you know they will eventually be key players in our little drama.
Meanwhile, Theo James (very handsome and for some reason playing… I think it’s Danish, but possibly Australian?) leads a crew on a bank heist. The bank? Conveniently adjacent to our unexploded bomb.
See where this is going?
Worthington offers strong support as James’ heist buddy. Mbatha-Raw is fine as the local constable trying to puzzle out what’s really going on. Thankless roles filled by excellent actors who elevate them as much as they can.
As the (literal) ticking-clock plot plunges ahead, allegiances are sussed out, true motivations come into relief and all the nagging little plot holes that movies like this usually leave dangling are nicely tied off. As military-themed heist movies go, it’s no Three Kings (1999, David O. Russell), and as plain ol’ heist movies go, it’s no “Heist” (2001, possibly the greatest heist movie of all-time).
As an almost-straight-to-video military-themed heist movies go, it’s “Ocean’s 11.”
Credit is due to journeyman director David Mackenzie (“Hell or High Water”), who unfolds the relatively intricate plot machinations in a breezy 95 minutes. It never stops moving.
So if, like me, you find yourself all caught up on “Ted Lasso,” “Lanterns,” “Reacher,” “Neagley,” “Sugar,” “Dark Matter” and “The Paper,” and you need something to fill your gaping, fiery maw, you could do much worse than “FUZE.”
Terry O’Brien is a longtime columnist from the Cape May, NJ area, a sometime columnist for Hollywood in Toto and has impeccable taste in music. He’s also an actor, a singer and a recovering karaoke host.
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