My dear readers, this is a very interesting film I watched earlier. I have to say, I really enjoyed it.
The Fix is the kind of mid-budget action thriller Hollywood used to make with more regularity: long, loud, a little overstuffed, and unexpectedly sincere about the damage that follows the men who do the dirty work. Directed by Guy Moshe from a story that began with former CIA officer Bazzel Baz, it follows a team of disgraced operators from the wreckage of Kabul to the streets of Tehran, chasing both a hidden fortune and a last shot at meaning. It is not a lean machine. It is a bruising, old-fashioned mission picture that wants spectacle and conscience, and for long stretches it gets both.
The film opens in August 2021, in the collapsing chaos of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Tucker, played by Zachary Levi with a clenched, exhausted gravity far from his superhero charm, leads a CIA special-operations team tasked with extracting a valued Afghan ally before the Taliban close in. This is not really that well explained in the film, and this could become a major shortcomings in time when the average viewer won’t know the history. The mission goes wrong in the way these missions always seem to go wrong: too late, too little air cover, impossible choices. Tucker makes one of those choices — one that saves some lives and ends another — and the Agency answers by discarding the entire unit. Liam Neeson’s Larry, their handler and something close to a father figure, is left equally stranded. The first half-hour is the film at its most effective: dusty, panicked, morally ugly, and unusually willing to sit with the shame of a botched rescue rather than rushing to the next explosion.
A year later, Tucker is adrift. The movie takes time with that drift — the strained marriage, the son he barely knows how to talk to, the nights that never quite end. Then Larry, now frail and slipping, lets something slip: in 1981, after the embassy fell, he and others bricked $25 million into a wall in Tehran for a counterrevolution that never came. The money is still there. So is an Iranian former asset who will only give up the location if Tucker also extracts her activist daughter. What begins as a payday becomes a redemption job, then a rescue, then a tangle of both. Tucker does what operators like him do. He calls the old team.That team is the movie’s secret weapon. Wes Chatham, Quincy Isaiah, Jake Choi, Augusto Aguilera, and Grant Harvey play the kind of interchangeable-looking operators who, in lesser films, vanish into beards and tactical vests. Here they have enough texture — grief, gallows humor, private debts — to feel like a unit rather than a firing squad. Elnaaz Norouzi’s Zara, recruited as Tucker’s cover wife and Farsi-speaking partner on the ground, gives the infiltration scenes a live-wire tension; Lara Wolf’s Maryam, the young woman they have to get out, refuses to be cargo. Annet Mahendru and Titus Welliver fill the edges with the bureaucratic and personal wreckage these men left behind. Neeson, used sparingly, is the film’s moral weather system: gravel, regret, and the sense that he has already paid more than the plot will admit.
Once the team is inside Iran, Moshe starts stacking plates. Cover identities, hotel corridors, Revolutionary Guard compounds, a train extraction running in parallel with a heist. The New York Times called that dual sequence lunacy that “plays,” and that is exactly right. Moshe cross-cuts with real showmanship: one team moving people, another tearing into a wall that has waited forty years, both clocks running out at once. It is the high point of the movie — messy, improbable, and genuinely exciting in the way a good heist-rescue hybrid should be. Larry Smith’s cinematography keeps the Tehran sequences readable even when the geography gets busy; the action is physical and a little brutal, more 13 Hours than slick superhero cleanup.
Visually, the film is very impressive with long camera shots of the Iranian landscape, further immersing you in the action, and making it all “feel” very real.
What distinguishes The Fix from a dozen other “one last job” pictures is its preoccupation with aftermath. These men are not looking for glory. They are looking for a version of themselves that can sleep. The script keeps circling sin, loyalty, and the difference between following an order and doing the right thing when the order is already too late. Faith language flickers at the edges — truth, freedom, the possibility of being remade — without turning the film into a sermon. Plugged In, of all places, noticed that the movie is about flawed people trying to make a better choice after they have already failed. That is the heartbeat under the gunfire. Tucker is not a superhero who discovers his power. He is a man who already used his power and cannot forget what it cost.
The film is long — 141 minutes — but I didn’t feel it. Moshe knows when to add a twist, a double-cross, or another corridor. Some of the geopolitics is broad. Some of the plotting is the kind of late-movie convolution that makes you throw up your hands and then, a minute later, lean forward anyway because the set piece is working. Variety called it polished but uneven, watchable even when it misses the bullseye. That is a fair description of its best self: not elegant, but committed. The performances hold when the story overreaches. Levi, asked to play the strong-silent type, finds something wounded and stubborn rather than blank. Neeson can do this role in his sleep and still makes it sting. The supporting women, given less room than they deserve, still register as people with agency rather than prizes.
The Fix will not convert anyone who wants lean, modern, morally tidy thrillers. It is an unapologetic American action movie about operators who break rules, bury cash, and then try to dig something better out of the wall. It is also, in its better hours, a film about what happens when the war ends and the men who fought it are still standing in the rubble, looking for a job that might feel like grace. See it for the Kabul opening, for the train-and-compound cross-cut, for Neeson’s quiet wreckage, and for a team that actually feels like a team.
Four point five stars out of five from me.
Mark's Writing Corner 