Film Review: The Fix

The Fix
Director: Guy Moshe
Astral Future, Dreamtime Films, Oakhurst Entertainment
In Theaters: 09.11.2026

Let’s start with the elephant in the room. Yes, The Fix, a military thriller rooted in the war in Afghanistan, is being released on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. While this seems like a provocative choice, the reality is that this is simply a weekend with a dearth of major new releases to compete with it. In other words, get the idea that there’s anything bold or interesting about this movie out of your head right now. 

The film begins with a pandering and pretentious biblical quote from Matthew 24:6, warning listeners and spurring rumors of war, which seems to be aimed at the “Jesus says grab your guns” crowd, followed by an overly long sequence of a botched mission during the last days of the war in Afghanistan, wherein CIA operative Tucker (Zachary Levi, Shazam!, Harold and the Purple Crayon) makes the impossible decision to kill an asset rather than let them be captured. The film jumps ahead a few years, and Tucker is estranged from his family and haunted by the choices he made; the former operative gets an unlikely second chance, however, when his former mentor, Larry (Liam Neeson, Schindler’s List, Taken), who is suffering from dementia, reveals that a fortune was abandoned at a hotel in Tehran. Tucker assembles his old team, along with Zara (Elnaaz Norouzi, Kandahar, Tehran), a Farsi-speaking interpreter selected by his own ex-wife, and heads into Iran, where they agree to rescue a young American woman and her companions in exchange for information about the missing money. With no official support and Iranian authorities closing in, the operation quickly becomes a dangerous combination of extraction mission and heist. As Tucker confronts his own troubled past and questions the reliability of Larry’s memories, he must decide whether redemption — and a fortune — are worth risking everything.

It’s almost impossible to make a movie that has absolutely no redeeming features in this day and age, yet ever since the Shazam! franchise ended, Zachary Levi has seemed to strive to prove that it can be done. The Fix is a plodding, bloated exercise in cinematic inertia, a movie that somehow manages to make a Tehran-set CIA heist about as exciting as a late-night trip to the toilet. Scenes drag on long after they’ve failed to make whatever point they were trying to make (or succeeded at hitting you over the head with one), subplots pile up without generating much momentum and the story repeatedly circles back on itself as though afraid to actually move forward. In place of characters and memorable dialogue, we get a lot of stiff posturing and lines like “You said to tell you when you’d gone too far. This is so far beyond too far that you need a goddamn spacesuit.” The pacing is roughly that of a snail with severe asthma. At nearly two and a half hours, The Fix desperately needs to tighten the aimless and oddly vague exposition and inject some urgency into the proceedings. There’s also an uncomfortable element of chauvinistic fantasy in the fact that Zara enters into the job almost instantly with the plan of throwing herself at the smoldering volcano of virile manhood that is Tucker, which feels more than anything like an ego-driven indulgence for Levi — who is both the lead and an executive producer — as if Harold put a clause in his contract that he has to get a chance to have his crayon played with.

Levi tries to play somber and brooding, leaving behind the sort of lively and often annoying man-child mugging that he’s becoming known for, and I never thought I’d miss it so much. He’s apparently decided that he can get through this film with only two facial expressions, alternating between “I need a hug” and “I need a laxative.” Neeson, once one of our greatest actors, is reduced to a variation on his performance in The A-Team, who has lost his mental acuity. It’s a serious subject that’s treated purely as a lazy plot device, and when he spouts lines like “This is just like Hanoi all over again” and sings “The Star-Spangled Banner,” it becomes clear that Neeson succeeded so well at stepping into Leslie Nielsen’s shoes in The Naked Gun that much of what he does for the rest of his career will play out like bad comedy even if it’s meant to be taken seriously. The unintentional comedic highlight, however, is when Levi and a local contact get past some guards by wearing medical masks and pretending to have COVID. At that point, I could almost hear Tom Servo from Mystery Science Theater 3000 blurt out, “I knew I shouldn’t have listened to that jackass from Chuck about vaccination.”

The Fix is a misfire from beginning to end, too macho and hard-nosed to be a drama and far too slow-moving to be labeled anything like an action thriller. If anything about the premise or subject matter interests you, check out Triple Frontier on Netflix, which does everything that The Fix aims to do and does it so much better. The biggest compliment I can give this movie is that it’s only the second biggest American failure involving Iran this year. —Patrick Gibbs

Read more film coverage from Patrick Gibbs below:
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