The Fix Review: Zachary Levi and Liam Neeson in a Geopolitical Thriller That Becomes Its Own Worst Enemy

“It’s Saigon all over again,” glowers Liam Neeson early in Guy Moshe’s action-thriller The Fix. His character, CIA agent Larry, has just overseen a 2021 Special Ops rescue mission in Kabul that’s gone disastrously, as these things are often prone to do. The chaotic, violence-laden sequence is but the first of many in a film that aspires to classic Hollywood action movie status but reduces its effectiveness through overkill of both the literal and figurative kind. It’s no wonder Larry is shown to be suffering from debilitating migraine headaches.

Cut to several years later, when Tucker (Zachary Levi), the Special Ops group leader, visits his old handler to discover that he’s now suffering from an advanced stage of dementia. But Larry remembers enough to tell Tucker about $25 million in cash that was left behind in the Hotel Tehran (the film’s previous, more effective title) during the Iranian Revolution. The bitter, disillusioned Tucker, estranged from his wife and young son because of his years of absence overseas, decides to round up the members of his old unit and embark on a mission to retrieve the money.

An Iranian former CIA asset knows where the money is hidden but will only reveal the information if Tucker agrees to retrieve her anti-Revolutionary Guard activist daughter (Lara Wolf) from the country while he’s there. In order to solidify his cover in Tehran and throw off the story’s villain, Qasim (Navid Negahban, Kandahar), Tucker hires a young Iranian-American woman, Zara (Bollywood star Elnaaz Norouzi, very good), to pose as his wife.

Things, needless to say, only get more complicated from there, with a romance developing between Tucker and Zara that prompts her to remain with him even when he attempts to ditch her for her own safety. When Tucker and his crew eventually succeed in raiding the building, now a government facility, where the money was hidden, they discover that the satchel contains only a fraction of the expected sum but also negative film strips that reveal evidence of … well, that would constitute a spoiler.

The filmmaker, whose previous credits include 2010’s Bunraku, served in the Israeli Army in the 1990s and displays a strong talent for conveying the chaos of battle and the hard-boiled attitudes of the soldiers who fight. The strong opening sequence, in which Tucker is forced to shoot an asset who’s been seized, is strikingly filmed and edited, and the smaller-scale action set pieces are equally strong.

Where he’s less effective is plotting, with The Fix featuring so many dubious plot twists (there’s one involving Neeson’s character that’s a doozy) that you begin throwing up your hands halfway through. This is a filmmaker who simply doesn’t know when to stop, as also evidenced by the film’s bloated 142-minute running time that lets narrative tedium set in.

Don’t be fooled by the film’s advertising, which features an image of Neeson’s scowling visage dwarfing Levi aiming an automatic weapon. The action-movie star (sorry, but that’s what he’s become) has only a small supporting role, but he makes the most of it as usual with his stolid screen presence.

It’s more surprising seeing Levi, whose usual screen persona is of the happy-go-lucky, wisecracking variety, as the macho military man. The actor, taking advantage of his formidable physicality, proves surprisingly effective, both with the action heroics and the big emotional beats he finally has the chance to deliver in the film’s final act. The supporting players, who include Titus Welliver in a brief turn as a CIA official, are mostly nondescript, although Quincy Isaiah, who played Magic Johnson in Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, displays impressive charisma as a member of Tucker’s team.