Tag: movie

The Fix: Kabul, Tehran, and an Old-School Mission of Redemption

A cinematic movie review aesthetic image featuring popcorn in a striped bucket, a vintage film reel, a clapperboard, and soft dramatic cinema lighting. Warm golden and deep red tones, moody atmosphere, film grain texture overlay. Horizontal composition, editorial feel.

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.

The Epic Career of Samuel L. Jackson, Hollywood’s Iron Man

A dramatic, cinematic illustration of a powerful, charismatic Hollywood actor on a dark, moody background. The scene evokes classic film noir combined with blockbuster energy — a silhouette of a commanding figure in a long coat, standing center frame with confident posture, surrounded by subtle visual references to iconic movie moments: a briefcase, a lightsaber glow, a shield emblem. Rich blacks, deep reds, and gold tones. Epic and timeless in feel.

Now, for a post about one of my favorite actors, the iconic Samuel L. Jackson. His career is one of the great American acting stories: late-blooming, relentlessly productive, and built on a rare mix of craft, presence, and pop-cultural permanence. He didn’t land a major role till his mid-forties. Over more than five decades he has gone from regional theater and bit parts to becoming one of the most recognizable faces in world cinema—and, by several box-office measures, among the highest-grossing actors of all time.

Born Samuel Leroy Jackson on December 21, 1948, in Washington, D.C., and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, he found acting while studying at Morehouse College. A stutter led a speech therapist to suggest the stage; he switched from architecture to drama and never really left. After graduating in 1972 he worked in New York theater, originating roles such as Private Louis Henderson in Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play and Boy Willie in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson. That stage foundation—precision of language, physical command, and an ability to hold a room—still shows in almost everything he does.

The film work started small: Coming to America (1988), Spike Lee’s School Daze and Do the Right Thing, a flash in Goodfellas. Then came Jungle Fever (1991). As Gator Purify, the crack-addicted brother of Wesley Snipes’s architect, Jackson was so raw and specific that the Cannes jury created a special supporting-actor prize for him. He used some of his own problems with drugs to help him reflect the rawness of it all. It was the first time many people outside the theater world saw what colleagues already knew: he could make a supporting part feel like the center of the movie.

Pulp Fiction (1994) made him a star. Jules Winnfield—scripture-quoting, briefcase-guarding, morally awakening hit man—is one of the defining performances of 1990s cinema. Jackson won the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor and earned an Oscar nomination; the Ezekiel 25:17 monologue became part of the culture. This is my favorite role that he played.

He followed it with a run that proved range rather than type: Zeus Carver in Die Hard with a Vengeance, Carl Lee Hailey in A Time to Kill, Mitch Henessey opposite Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight, and Ordell Robbie in Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, which won him the Silver Bear at Berlin. He could be terrifying, funny, righteous, or all three in the same scene.

Then came the franchises that turned a great character actor into a global brand. As Mace Windu in the Star Wars prequels he gave the Jedi Council a steel spine and a purple lightsaber—his own request so he could find himself in the crowd. As Nick Fury in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beginning with a post-credits cameo in Iron Man (2008), he became the connective tissue of the biggest film series of the 21st century. Marvel had already modeled Ultimate Nick Fury on his likeness; Jackson signed a multi-picture deal and made the eyepatch, the trench coat, and the dry authority feel inevitable. He also voiced Frozone in The Incredibles films, proving he could sell heroism with nothing but a voice.

What is most impressive is that the blockbusters never replaced the interesting work. He kept returning to Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight), took on Unbreakable and Glass with M. Night Shyamalan, led Shaft, and later went back to Broadway in the 2022 revival of The Piano Lesson, earning a Tony nomination. In 2022 the Academy gave him an Honorary Oscar, describing him as “a cultural icon whose dynamic work has resonated across genres and generations and audiences worldwide.” That citation is accurate.

The numbers only underline the consistency. His films have collectively grossed well over $27 billion worldwide; Guinness and box-office trackers have repeatedly placed him at or near the top of actor gross lists, with dozens of titles clearing $100 million. He works constantly, chooses roles that amuse him as much as they pay him (Snakes on a Plane is the famous example), and still sounds like himself—wry, precise, a little dangerous—whether he is quoting scripture or assembling the Avengers.

The career is a model of durability without calcification. Jackson did not become a movie star until his mid-forties, then spent the next thirty years refusing to shrink. He made supporting parts legendary, leading parts bankable, and franchise parts human. That combination—theater-trained intensity, pop-star recognizability, and a work ethic that never cooled—is why the review of his career stays so easy to write in the positive: there is simply an enormous amount of good work, and it keeps arriving.