written by: Guy Moshe and Mark Bacci
produced by: Guy Moshe, Marina Grasic, Matthew G. Zamias, Wendy Sweetmore & Justin Oberman
directed by: Guy Moshe
rating: R (for strong/bloody violence, language, and some nudity)
runtime: 141 min.
U.S. release date: September 11, 2026
Not much goes right in “The Fix,” either in the story or in how it tells it. Based on the poster alone, it looks to be yet another Liam Neeson actioner, who looms large in the image, while a smaller-positioned Zachary Levi aims an assault rifle at us. The geopolitical thriller, co-written by director Guy Moshe and Marck Bacci, reminds us that it takes more than gunplay to make an action flick worthy of your time. Any attempt at injecting thrills into this overlong heist story revolving around a convoluted extraction in a war zone by a team of former CIA operatives is completely absent. This feature lacks not only excitement, but also actors who care about their roles and characters that aren’t dull and borderline catatonic. It’s confounding how off this debacle is, but any semblance of entertainment or viewer interest is MIA.
Set in 2021, the story follows Tucker (Levi), who leads his elite CIA operators in Kabul, Afghanistan, when intelligence expert Larry (Neeson), his supervisor and mentor, is called in after debilitating migraines and needs help with a possible extraction. This mission quickly goes disastrously (and predictably) wrong for everyone involved, as one of the men loses a leg and the new addition, Clay (Quincy Isaiah), learns more about how the men handle problems. It’s a chaotic and violent opening sequence whose effectiveness is mired in its proclivity for overkill.
Several years later, 2022 to be precise, we catch up with a fly-fishing Tucker, who is visiting his old handler to learn he’s now suffering from an advanced stage of dementia. Larry may come across as confused, but Tucker believes that his rambling may indicate that there could be $25 million in cash that was hidden behind a wall in a building called “Hotel Tehran” (which was the movie’s original title, more interesting than “The Fix”) during the Iranian Revolution.
Tucker is haunted by what happened in Kabul, leaving him permanently bitter and disillusioned. Already estranged from his wife and young son after years overseas, Tucker sees the loot as life-changing for him and his old unit, and he persuades them to return to the Middle East with him for yet another special mission. Upon arriving in Tehran, Tucker connects with a former Iranian CIA asset who knows where the money is hidden but will help the team only if Tucker retrieves her daughter, Maryam (Laura Wolf), a journalist and anti-Revolutionary Guard activist, and extradite her and a busload of other women from the country.
To blend in and throw off the story’s antagonist, local law enforcement officer Qasim (Navid Negahban, “Kandahar”), Tucker hires a young Iranian-American woman, Zara (Bollywood star Elnaaz Norouzi), to pose as his wife. Tucker’s success is threatened by an unstable political climate and a suspicious Qasim, making it hard to achieve the mission’s goal.
Pacing and brevity are real problems from the start of “The Fix,” as the film takes too long to get to anything interesting. The first thirty minutes, devoted entirely to that 2021 botched mission, are unnecessarily confusing thanks to the bland screenplay and Moshe’s inert direction. Another problem is Tucker, played by a glowering bearded Levi with shrapnel scars on his face, who is miscast and conveys his internal vacancy by settling on a single cold expression. The character is written as something of a Jack Ryan, but the writing and portrayal here end up being the farthest thing from that famous Tom Clancy character. It’s unfortunate that “The Fix” unintentionally highlights Levi’s limitations. The actor is miscast here and unable to carry the feature or lift the whole project out of its mire. He’s playing a character that calls for more complexity, both in its characterization and its performance. In a much smaller role (one could consider it a cameo), Neeson doesn’t fare much better. Granted, part of the issue is the cliched dialogue that the actors have to work with.
“The Fix” is littered with so many cringe lines that it quickly goes from laughable to intolerable. Beyond these wretched lines, the film also inserts a plethora of exposition dumps into a boring narrative that lumbers toward an absurd dead end.
Not even bursts of action can break the monotonous, dirge-like tone of Moshe’s latest feature. The director has other duds, such as 2011’s “Bunraku” and 2020’s “LX 2048”, which were messy and vapid, respectively, but this one wasn’t just a boring slog; it was painful to get through.
RATING: *1/2