Theo James, Aaron Taylor-Johnson Ignite Heist Thriller ‘Fuze’

David Mackenzie wants you to have a good time. 

The helmer, who brought “Relay” to TIFF last year, is back at the festival with thriller “Fuze,” starring the high-wattage Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Theo James. “Fuze” makes its world premiere Sept. 5 as a Gala Presentation in Toronto.

The filmmaker, who’s behind heady pics like “Hell or High Water,” “Young Adam” and the series “Under the Banner of Heaven,” says, “This is probably the furthest I’ve gone into saying, let’s be a little bit more pure with the entertainment.”  

“Fuze” starts out straightforward enough, with construction workers discovering an unexploded WWII bomb in a London work site. The police and Army bomb squad, led by Taylor-Johnson, are called in. But while the area has been evacuated, a gang of robbers led by James is drilling into the subterranean vault of a nearby bank. That’s when the twists, turns and thrills start. Mackenzie notes that the kinetic quality, the “purity” of the action, is “interesting to me as a director. I’m not just sort of just churning something out. We kind of jokingly said it, it’s like a heist film made by the Ramones, you know, 91 minutes long,” he says with a laugh. 

In this era of long features and overly stuffed series, audiences may thank him for taking such a punk rock approach to the material. 

“The script has been with me for a long time. It comes from an original idea of mine that I had about at least a decade ago, about trying to kind of mash up the sort of excitement and tension of an unexploded bomb movie with the excitement and tension of a heist movie,” he says. “It seems like every few months, somebody discovers an unexploded World War II bomb in a building site. And then there’s an evacuation, and there’s a kind of protocol in place, and that sort of felt like it was fun to lean into.” 

While the Ben Hopkins script laid the base, the fast-paced editing of the action is what really ignites “Fuze.” 

Mackenzie says he and editor Matt Mayer (who also worked on “Relay”) needed a lot of time to hone the footage, distilling the story down to its essence, so the movie conveys the necessary information, then quickly moves on. (“I was a bit upset I didn’t get down to 90 minutes,” Mackenzie admits.) Along the way, they drop breadcrumbs for the audience to follow, but they’re not obvious.  

“Every scene in this film is in some way complicated, there’s only two or three straight dialogue scenes,” he says. “But even they’ve got stuff going on, so there’s no way to sort of rest, you know, in terms of that process, but that’s part of the fun of it.”