resident

David Mackenzie’s “Fuze” springs to life in a millisecond.

In central London, a construction digger unearths an unexploded World War II bomb, and it starts to tick. The blast radius could be a half-mile wide. Outside the cordon, Chief Supt. Zuzana (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) oversees the evacuation of thousands of residents to Hyde Park. Inside the cordon, a military explosives expert, Maj. Tranter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), marshals his squad to disarm the weapon. Also inside the cordon, a heist crew headed by thieves Karalis and X (Theo James and Sam Worthington, respectively) uses the dangerous distraction to rob a bank.

Three skilled teams, three goals. Meanwhile, a displaced neighborhood resident named Rahim (Elham Ehsas) is cooling his heels in Hyde Park very aware of an evening flight that his family is supposed to be on. His clan will factor into the plot too, although his wheelchair-bound father flusters, “Nobody ever tells me what’s going on.” Join the club, old man.

“Fuze” was one of my favorite treats at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival, although unlike many of the other films it premiered alongside, it has no pretensions of being an awards contender. (Mackenzie’s 2016 modern western “Hell or High Water” did make a moderate Oscar splash.) This is just quality popcorn filmmaking that spins the audience in circles as we watch experts do their jobs. I left the theater feeling giddily put through the wringer by its contrarian depictions of heroes and fiends.

A mechanical exercise more than a character piece, the script by Ben Hopkins (of the 2023 Willem Dafoe existentialist art burglar drama “Inside”) functions like an elaborate contraption. First, you’re impressed by the scale. Then, it reveals how its small moving parts fit together — and at the very end, just when you think you’ve clinched it, there’s a surprise coda that makes you unpack everything again to reassemble the story from a completely different perspective.

It’s a film with a few strong opinions about how the world is being run. Yet, they’re rarely said out loud. Everyone on-screen is a person of action, not words — particularly Taylor-Johnson’s major, a veteran of the War on Terror, who is so calm under pressure that he’s introduced sniping a bull’s-eye at Lord knows how many meters. He’s the sort of character who tends to come across either bland or unconvincingly cocky-funny. Here, he’s compellingly focused on the task at hand and, like all the leads, never pauses to fill in the audience on exactly what he’s doing.

The performances are all from the grip-and-grin school of acting: neat and precise with a minimum of bluster. “Fuze’s” version of a joke is when an anxious underling pipes up to ask for permission to speak. “No,” Tranter snaps, and his gruffness is so confident that it makes you chuckle. Yet even he has a boss, Gen. Minton (Iain Fletcher), who storms into one scene to yank on Tranter’s chain of command and disrupt the power balance again.

Instead of bothering much about dialogue, “Fuze” is a blueprint of how stress and deference exert themselves upon a workplace. The robber clique turns out to have its own bosses, too, as well as the most visible fractures in their unit. You’d be correct to guess that within their grand scheme lurks at least one or two self-interested ruses run by either James’ Karalis or Worthington’s X. The other crooks don’t have names worth learning, but the actors playing them, Shaun Mason and Nabil Elouahabi, do have memorable faces.

There are no flourishes onscreen other than Matt Mayer’s editing, which is relentless. Mackenzie barely gives the audience a pause to ask questions, although he does get around to answering them (mostly). All this competence puts us in a strange state — a suspenseful trance — in which you feel on edge while also relaxing into the idea that the characters have things under control. Unpredictable twists are afoot. But the pace moves so fast that you can only observe, not outguess, the surprises, putting us in the same fix as a heavy, played by Dragos Bucur, who moans that he knows he’s getting screwed over, “but I don’t know how.”

Coming at cross purposes, some of these people will fail. One unit — it would be a spoiler to specify which — evaporates toward the climax and, oddly, isn’t missed. While the outro feels tacked on, upon reflection, it’s the missing piece that transforms the movie from a puzzle into a proclamation on group cohesion. Only afterward does it hit us that Mackenzie has really made a thriller about trust. Each of these groups (and shadow groups) is united by either duty, blood or circumstance. Of those factors, one proves more adhesive than the rest.

“Fuze” does smack a bit of an excellent episode of TV. Everyone in the cast is a little too pretty for their jobs. Likewise, the score by Tony Doogan leans too heavily on generic electronic thuds, the kind that segue into a commercial break cliffhanger and an ad for blood pressure medicine. When his techno beats kick in during the most fraught sequences, however, the effect is dynamite. As the closing credits kick in, Mackenzie lets off some well-earned steam with an apropos punk rock anthem, the Clash’s cover of “Police & Thieves.”

Eaton wildfire survivors’ anger about Southern California Edison’s burying of electric wires in Altadena boiled over Tuesday with residents calling on government officials to temporarily halt the work.

In a letter to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, more than 120 Altadena residents and the town’s council wrote that they had witnessed “manifest failures” by Edison in recent months as it has been tearing up streets and digging trenches to bury the wires.

The residents cited the unexpected financial cost of the work to homeowners and possible harm to the town’s remaining trees. They also pointed out how the work will leave telecommunication wires above ground on poles.

“The current lack of coordination is compounding the stress of a community still reeling from the Eaton Fire, and risks causing further irreparable harm,” the residents wrote.

The council voted unanimously Tuesday night to send the letter.

Scott Johnson, an Edison spokesman, said Wednesday that the company has been working to address the concerns, including by looking for other sources of funds to help pay for the homeowners’ costs.

“We recognize this community has already faced a number of challenges,” he said.

Johnson said the company will allow homeowners to keep existing overhead lines connecting their homes to the grid if they are worried about the cost.

Edison’s crews, Johnson said, have also been trained to use equipment that avoids roots and preserves the health of trees.

The utility has said that burying the wires as the town rebuilds thousands of homes destroyed in the fire will make the electrical grid safer and more reliable.

But anger has grown as work crews have shown up unexpectedly and residents learned they’re on the hook to pay tens of thousands of dollars to connect their homes to the buried lines.

Residents have also found the crews digging under the town’s oak and pine trees that survived last year’s fire. Arborists say the trenches could destroy the roots of some of the last remaining trees and kill them.

Amy Bodek, the county’s regional planning director, recently warned Edison that a government ordinance protects oak trees and that “utility trenching is not exempt from these requirements.”

Residents have also pointed out that in much of Altadena, the telecom companies, including Spectrum and AT&T, have not agreed to bury their wires in Edison’s trenches. That means the telecom wires will remain on poles above ground, which residents say is visually unappealing.

“While our community supports the long-term benefits of moving utilities underground, the current execution by SCE is placing undue financial and planning burdens on homeowners, causing irreparable harm to our heritage tree canopy, and proceeding without adequate local oversight,” the residents wrote.

They want the project halted until the problems are addressed.

Edison announced last year that it would spend as much as $925 million to underground and rebuild its grid in Altadena and Malibu, where the Palisades fire caused devastation.

The work — which costs an estimated $4 million per mile — will earn the utility millions of dollars in profits as its electric customers pay for it over the next decades.

Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, told Gov. Gavin Newsom last year that state utility rules would require Altadena and Malibu homeowners to pay to underground the electric wire from their property line to the panel on their house. Pizarro estimated it would cost $8,000 to $10,000 for each home.

But some residents, who need to dig long trenches, say it will cost them much more.

“We are rebuilding and with the insurance shortfall, our finances are stretched already,” Marilyn Chong, an Altadena resident, wrote in a comment attached to the letter. “Incurring the additional burden of financing SCE’s infrastructure is not something we can or should have to do.”

Other fire survivors complained of Edison’s lack of planning and coordination with residents.

“I’ve started rebuilding, and apparently there won’t be underground power lines for me to connect with in time when my house will be done,” wrote Gail Murphy. “So apparently I’m supposed to be using a generator, and for how long!?”

Johnson said the company has set up a phone line for people with concerns or questions. That line — 1-800-250-7339 — is answered Monday through Saturday, he said.

Residents can also go to Edison’s office in Altadena at 2680 Fair Oaks Avenue. The office is open Monday to Friday from 8 to 4:30.

It’s unclear if the Eaton fire would have been less disastrous if Altadena’s neighborhood power lines had been buried.

The blaze ignited under Edison’s towering transmission lines that run through Eaton Canyon. Those lines carry bulk power through the company’s territory. In Altadena, Edison is burying the smaller distribution lines, which carry power to homes.

The government investigation into the cause of the fire has not yet been released. Pizarro has said that a leading theory is that a century-old transmission line, which had not carried power for 50 years, somehow re-energized to spark the blaze.

The fire killed at least 19 people and destroyed more than 9,400 homes and other structures.