At last year’s Toronto film festival, the genre-switching Scottish director David Mackenzie premiered Relay, his sly, charmingly lo-tech riff on paranoid thrillers of the 70s. It was a film that sadly crumbled in its last act (and at the box office months later) but it was an admirable attempt to do the one thing people keep begging of directors: make the kind of films that they used to make.
His follow-up, Fuze, also premiering at Toronto, is another hark back, just not quite as far this time. It’s closer to something that might have come out of British cinema in the early 2000s, a fruitful period for the crime thriller, spurred on by the emergence of Guy Ritchie and a desire to both return to classics of the 60s and 70s and beat Hollywood at its own game. In fact, it’s a film that would have hugely benefited from Ritchie and his considerable swagger at the helm, resembling the kind of action thriller he might have taken on in his recent, underrated period, of expertly made if ultimately low-level winners.
