[Rating: Rock Fist Way Down]
In Theaters Friday, September 11
A narrative bird’s nest stocked with shallow characters, spotty acting, shitty politics, and schizophrenic editing, The Fix isn’t just bad: it’s depressing. Depressing not because there’s a good movie in here trying to get out (there isn’t), or decent performances obscured by shoddy filmmaking (not at all the case), but because in an era where original action movies are so rare, something like The Fix is what rose to the top and got into production. Audiences deserve better than this, actors like Liam Neeson and Wes Chatham deserve better than this, Zachary Levi deserves…well, maybe that guy does deserve this.
A not-at-all quick cold open set in 2021 Afghanistan introduces C.I.A. special ops squad leader Tucker (Levi) working with supervisor Larry (Neeson) to extract a local wartime contact before the Taliban can set upon him for reprisals. The movie paints this period as a chaotic clusterfuck that leads to the operation going sideways, and as a result the agency cuts Larry, Tucker, and most of Tucker’s team loose. Jumping ahead a year, Tucker learns that Larry is suffering from a medical condition that affects his memory, and during a visit, Larry reveals the existence of a fabled gold stash in Iran.
Tucker connects with one of Larry’s former contacts to learn the location of the stash, but she won’t give it up unless he also rescues her daughter, who’s still in-country. Tucker hires a civilian woman, Zara (Elnaaz Norouzi), to pose as his wife on the operation, and assembles his old crew to not only rescue a mark but also take the treasure. This group of six make it into Iran without too much fuss, yet problems abound once they start in on their work, at which point the cars of this narrative start smacking into the backs of each other every time The Fix lurches to one of its many halts.
At a little over 140 minutes, one of the biggest problems The Fix has is not just its length, but its route to get there. Director Guy Moshe co-wrote the script, and the movie feels like an assembly cut pieced together by someone unwilling to kill their darlings. The 2021 prologue could have just as effectively conveyed the themes and motivations of the characters in passing conversation or second-/third-act dialogue reveals, saving an already bloated runtime a full thirty minutes. And while the addition of Zara and the daughter/asset give Tucker and his team some much-needed humanity, it pulls in the opposite direction of the film’s central conceit.
Is this a story about a heist and the battle-therapy of the men involved, or a redemption fable about soldiers who have lost their souls? A movie like The Wild Bunch, which The Fix seems to be in a dialogue with, balanced these two ideas by turning the central conflict into a referendum on modernity and the bond the men had formed with each other. In Moshe’s version, Tucker’s squad just grumbles about how the powers that be left them behind, and keeps going back and forth on whether they are in Iran for the money or for their personal redemption. After the fourth plot twist scrambles the story beyond any semblance of the original set-up, one almost feels dizzy with all of it.
The result is a film that doesn’t know what it wants to be, and in trying to do several things, does none well. This starts at the top with Levi, who plays Tucker with an aloof blankness that may very well be an accurate representation of an assassin spy, but reads on-screen as a black hole of depth and charisma. The rest of the cast can at least lean on the flat, exposition-driven nature of their lines as the reason their characters don’t pop, yet Levi has no such excuse and does next to nothing with the ample screentime he enjoys.
It’s always tough when a movie’s lead consistently “loses” the scenes they are in with others, yet any time Levi shares a moment with someone in The Fix, he’s the second or third most interesting thing in-frame. This is particularly tough whenever Chatham appears, as he crackles with an unpredictable, coiled sort of energy that Moshe and the movie are groping around for with Tucker and the action set pieces. And again, although the clipped, almost staccato nature of these action sequences might be true to life and how things actually go down, like Levi’s portrayal of Tucker, they don’t make for engaging cinema.
The result is a movie with a bloated, unfocused narrative led by a bad actor in a movie with its heart in the wrong place vis a vis its politics. Although it never says so outright, there’s an undercurrent of disgust with the Biden administration for a perceived fumbling of the Afghanistan withdrawal and the subsequent fallout for soldiers who could have gotten a job done if not for the rotten puke politicians. It screams of 1980s Hollywood Vietnam revisionism, and the movie’s saber rattling for regime change in that country couldn’t have come at a worse time.
A few crackling scenes and interactions by/between Chatham and fellow operators Charlie (Jake Choi) and Bruce (Augusto Aguilera) aside, there is almost nothing to redeem The Fix on any artistic or base enjoyment level. And besides that, it’s longer than hell and boring to boot. This makes for a tough sell for The Fix, especially since a person can just as easily get their taste of right-leaning Iran war fantasies with a quick trip over to Fox News these days.
“Obvious Child” is the debut novel of Warren Cantrell, a film and music critic based out of Seattle, Washington. Mr. Cantrell has covered the Sundance and Seattle International Film Festivals, and provides regular dispatches for Scene-Stealers and The Playlist. Warren holds a B.A. and M.A. in History, and his hobbies include bourbon drinking, novel writing, and full-contact kickboxing.
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