Film reviews: Fuze | The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
David Mackenzie’s new film Fuze has a number of entertaining twists up its sleeve, writes Alistair Harkness
Fuze (15) ★★★★
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG) ★★
David Mackenzie’s new film Fuze has an irresistible premise for fans of old-school suspense movies. A literal ticking bomb thriller, it begins with a London construction crew unearthing an unexploded device left over from the Blitz and, befitting its title, proceeds like a lit fuse as Aaron Taylor Johnson’s army bomb-disposal expert descends on the scene with his team while the police (led by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) shut the area down, monitoring the evacuation of the public via a vast network of thermal imaging and surveillance cameras. Cutting between these two rapidly evolving operations, Mackenzie (working from an enjoyably preposterous script by Ben Hopkins) ratchets up the tension by zeroing in on the Hurt Locker-style efforts of Taylor-Johnson’s Will Tranter – who has a problem with authority, but is loyal to his team – to neutralise said bomb, which is unstable, ticking, and could go off at any second.
But it’s not just about the bomb. Fuze is also a heist movie and the film quickly introduces a third operation, this one led by a mysterious crew in hi-vis jackets who resist the evacuation order in order to hide out in a nearby block of flats for reasons the film gives away almost immediately (fans of Die Hard with a Vengeance may feel a certain sense of deja vu here). The good news, though, is that Fuze actually has a number of entertaining twists up its sleeve and watching the way Mackenzie and his cast – which also includes Sam Worthington and Theo James – set them off is part of the fun, not least because all the elements that need to fall into place for the various schemes within the film to work are so elaborate it actually adds an extra layer of suspense knowing that nothing can possibly run like clockwork.
As with last year’s Relay, Mackenzie is essentially playing around in a style of no-nonsense genre filmmaking that’s becoming rarer and rarer in cinemas. It’s rarer still to get a film like this set in Britain, or at least, one set in Britain that doesn’t feature Jason Statham and the sort of that’ll-do-plotting that often accompanies his films. It helps that in Taylor-Johnson, Mackenzie has a British movie star who can deliver sardonic lines and convincingly deliver on the action front, both of which help offset the fact that the setting also, at times, gives the film a bit of a TV feel (an ongoing problem for British thrillers that don’t feature James Bond). But as the action starts expanding beyond the contained locale of the first act, Fuze does become slicker and more cinematic, with a final twist bringing the film to a close in an unexpected and intriguing way… at least until it over-eggs things with some what-happened-next explanatory text that weirdly tries to reframe what we’ve just watched as a jokey caper movie. For the most part, though, this is a blast.
The billion-dollar-grossing success of 2024’s animated The Super Mario Bros. Movie instantly made it the most successful video-game adaptation in history. That was, admittedly, a low bar to clear. Nevertheless, given the gaming industry has been significantly out-performing the movie industry for years, it was a notable win, capitalising not just on the ongoing popularity of Nintendo’s most iconic characters among kids more familiar with their Switch devices than the inside of a cinema, but also on the nostalgia of their Millennial or Gen X parents for their own childhood encounters with the moustachioed plumbers on various consoles or arcade machines. The fact that the film itself was pretty rubbish didn’t seem to be much of a deterrent – and it’s doubtful that it will be much of a deterrent to the success of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie either.
READ MORE: Film reviews: Project Hail Mary | Ready or Not 2: Here I Come | Dead Man’s Wire | Don’t Be Prey
Following the super-size-it rule of sequel production, this second film ramps up the star quotient, adding Glen Powell, Brie Larson, Donald Glover and Bennie Safdie to a voice cast that already boasts Chris Pratt (as Mario), Charlie Day (as his brother Luigi), Jack Black (as fire-breathing villain Bowser) and Anya Taylor-Joy (as Princess Peach). It also ramps up the plot, bringing in a Frozen-style backstory for Princess Peach that explains her magic powers, as well an inter-dimensional plan by Bowser’s embittered son, Bowser Jr (Safdie), to kidnap the sister that Princess Peach never knew she had in order to free Bowser’s now incarcerated and miniaturised father from captivity after the events of the first film.
Along the way there are token efforts at character development (Mario apparently has a crush on Princess Peach), but its funniest moments occur when the film finds sly ways to incorporate and pastiche the gameplay of its source material, which it does too infrequently to build to anything as subversive as The Lego Movie or as endearingly goofy as last year’s A Minecraft Movie.
Fuze is in cinemas from 3 April; The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is in cinemas from tomorrow
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