Liam Neeson may be on the poster, but The Fix belongs to Zachary Levi, who plays a disgraced former CIA operative pulled back into the game for a supposedly impossible job in Tehran. Before I walked into the theater, all signs pointed to a heist-based film that involved some vague military/spy-type people … basically the movie Ronin, but likely not nearly as good. Over the two-hour-and-twenty-minute runtime, I watched a mediocre 90-minute heist film and about an hour of a poorly made-for-television spy flick.
To be honest, there could be a decent movie here. It just needs a better editor with a sharp razor blade and a free hand to let whole plotlines hit the cutting room floor. As The Fix progresses, convoluted and unnecessary complications become overwhelming. The basic heist is pretty entertaining. A group of former operatives with plenty of baggage getting back together for one last job has enough potential to carry a solid action movie. Sure, it’s a movie we’ve all seen before. Most heist movies are. They are formulaic, and that’s OK. The action is there, too. The opening sequence in Afghanistan is brutal and starts off with a lot of promise. Director Guy Moshe handles the action with confidence. However, right at the end of this sequence, we get our first glimpse of cheesy, over-the-top dialogue and poor, just plain weird choices that ruin the movie. It’s from Liam Neeson, too.
His character goes off the rails and starts half-singing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” It was so badly done, it smacked of high school drama students trying to be edgy. Neeson’s acting, combined with his Irish accent, made his role as a 50-year veteran CIA operative more than a little unbelievable.
The rest of the characters’ dialogue doesn’t help. They routinely say exactly what the audience is already thinking, while supposedly clever exchanges often sound like placeholders that somehow survived all the way to filming. It really feels like AI wrote a lot of this. The plot keeps introducing new secrets, betrayals and motivations, only to hurriedly explain them later. By the end, so many loose threads have been pulled into place that I almost expected the movie to hand out a flowchart. The Fix spends far too much time explaining itself and not enough time enjoying the simple pleasure of watching a team pull off a dangerous robbery.
The treatment of Iran is another problem. There is nothing wrong with making the Iranian government an antagonist in a thriller, but The Fix lays it on so thick that the geopolitical material starts feeling less like part of the story and more like a message the filmmakers desperately want you to receive. That is particularly awkward given the current and highly unpopular U.S. conflict with Iran. Whatever point the movie is trying to make about governments, covert operations and the people caught between them gets muddled by its heavy-handed approach.
Levi is also not good enough to carry this role. His stoic approach and his character Tucker’s actions at the end are just weird. He does give Tucker enough weariness and physical presence to suggest he could make the jump into more serious action roles, though, even if this one isn’t great. Neeson, meanwhile, brings the expected authority to Larry, even if the movie doesn’t give him nearly enough to do and turns the character into a cartoon by the end of the film.
I initially scored this film just shy of the middle because there could be a decent smash-and-grab flick here. But as I mull over all the foibles, terrible dialogue, terrible acting and downright bizarre choices, the score keeps dropping. 3/10 is all I can muster.
