Producers: Guy Moshe, David Lipper, Robert A. Daly, Jr., Wendy Sweetmore, Marina Grasic, Justin Oberman, Salom Eisenbach, Ryan Winterstern and Matthew G. Zambas Director: Guy Moshe Screenplay: Guy Moshe, Mark Bacci and Ron Hutchinson Cast: Zachary Levi, Quincy Isaiah, Wes Chatham, Jake Choi, Augusto Aguilera, Elnaaz Narouzi, Navid Negahban, Lara Wolf, Annet Mahendru, Nicole Ansari Cox. Grant Harvey, Oliver Trevena, Alon Moni Aboutbui, Numan Acar, Giorgi Abuladze, Major Doge, Jr., Titus Welliver and Liam Neeson Distributor: Inaugural Entertainment
Grade: D
This is one of the more preposterous action movies in recent memory, which given the genre is saying quire a lot. And its absurdity is accentuated by the seriousness with which it takes itself.
“The Fix” begins with an abortive CIA operation in 2021 Kabul, where a special ops team directed from a tech center by demonstrative Larry (Liam Neeson) and led on the ground by his stoic protégé Tucker (Zachary Levi) is trying to rescue a local asset, Hamid (Giorgi Abuladze), who’s being taken into custody by the Taliban as the U.S.-sponsored Afghan government is collapsing. The unauthorized mission goes awry, with Hamid killed and one of Tucker’s team badly injured.
Some years later, Tucker, despondent and estranged from his wife Sophie (Annet Mahendru) and son Troy (Major Dodge, Jr.), visits Larry, who’s apparently suffering from dementia but discloses that he had hidden a stash of money—some $25 million intended to fund a counter-revolution—behind the wall of a room in a place he calls “Hotel Tehran” during the hostage crisis of 1979).
With the help of CIA insider James (Titus Welliver), Tucker identifies Fariba (Nicole Ansari Cox), an Iranian expatriate in Paris, as the person who can disclose its precise whereabouts. But she has a price for her collaboration: the extraction of her daughter Maryam (Lara Wolf), a dissident, from Iran. To provide a cover story for their visit to an unfriendly country, the reassembled group—Tucker and his old comrades Alex (Wes Chatham), Charlie (Jake Choi) and Bruce (Augusto Aguilera), reinforced by newbie Chase (Quincy Isaiah)—enlists student Zara (Elnaaz Narouzi) to pose as Tucker’s wife.
The group enters Iran without much difficulty (something that, in the present wartime situation, dilutes the story’s plausibility) and locates Maryam, but she demands the extraction of her dissident “sisters” as well as herself. And Qasim (Navid Negahban), a bigwig in the Iranian intelligence service, proves troublesome in more ways than one. In fact, the difficulties facing his group prove so formidable that Tucker must call on Moshe (Alon Moni Aboutbui) for a few favors along the way.
“The Fix” has a great many problems, starting with a script that becomes a veritable avalanche of twists, betrayals, double-crossings and unlikely coincidences. The biggest of these involves Larry, and one of the picture’s biggest virtues us that Neeson plays it to the hilt, offering a dose of raffishly cynical humor to the proceedings that’s most welcome.
Unfortunately, Neeson is actually a minor player here, appearing in only a few sequences dropped periodically into the narrative, and for the most part one has to put up with Levi at the forefront. But while it may be admirable that he’s stretching beyond his usually goofy persona into something more dramatic, his Tucker is a pretty boring, one-note fellow, intense but dour and frankly uninteresting, though he does rev up for the occasional action scenes, which director Guy Moshe and his crew handle pretty well.
They’re much less successful, unhappily, in dealing with the long expository sequences, where the convolutions of the narrative have to be spelled out. That affects most of the other members of the cast, and not in a good way. Negahban and Aboutbui come off best, the one for his villainous sneer and the other for his offhanded cynicism, but Narouzi is also effective even if the romantic subplot between Zara and Tucker is farfetched. (It does have a typically outrageous payoff, though.) Of Levi’s comrades-in-arms, the character of Clay is endowed with some interesting layers, but Isaiah doesn’t have the chops to make much of them.
Nor is the film, shot in two rather incongruous locales—Mississippi and Georgia (the country, not the state)—very attractive visually. Production designer Chris Stull and costumer Jeannine Flynn Shot presumably did what they could, but the result is simply uninteresting, as is Larry Smith’s cinematography. Editors Moshe and Daniel Dor let matters run on overmuch, resulting in a punishing run-time of nearly two-and-a-half hours, and the score by Federico Bisozzi and Davide Tomat is too generic to amp things up.
But what seals the movie’s doom is its reliance on a conspiracy theory as its ultimate twist. What lurks behind that wall is not just money but evidence of something that, according to more than one character, could have enormous repercussions in two countries—and has, in fact, driven all the intricate stratagems that have unfolded over the picture’s course. The fact is that the theory has been around for quite some time without much coming of it, and the notion that the “evidence” uncovered here would cause public outcry today is simply ludicrous. When a character yells “I will send this directly to the Washington Post,” it’s a sure sign the writers are living in an entirely different world from the one we know.
“The Fix” is a movie in need of substantial repairs. But to make them, one would have to go back to the script-writing and casting stages.