Spending two-and-a-half hours with a squad of soldiers, ex-soldiers, or pseudo-soldiers necessitates either some intense masculine emotions, an all-important mission, some meatheaded humor to lighten the otherwise suffocating mood, or some combination of the three. The Fix, which sets its band of bros on a quest for hidden cash nestled in the heart of Tehran, desperately avoids them all like a humvee dodging so many IEDs, making its spin on films like Kelly’s Heroes and Three Kings into dead-serious and deadly boring schlock.
The film overplays its hand early: An establishing mission at the tailend of the War In Afghanistan quickly turns into a savage shooting gallery, which could only look more jingoistic if most of the enemy combatants didn’t look like white people in turbans. That’s a different problem, one that might’ve arisen from filming The Fix quickly and cheaply in Mississippi and Georgia (the Caucasian country, not the nearby state that’s become America’s top producer of obvious soundstages). As is, the firefight in Kabul is just a chance for director, co-writer, and co-editor Guy Moshe—who once made stylish if empty fare like Bunraku—to try his hand at creatively bankrupt, still-empty, sub-Michael Bay fare, where an informant extraction goes tits up.
And of course it does when the likes of Tucker (Zachary Levi, in gruff John Krasinski-like action figure mode) ventures in, grimly heading up a collection of bearded CIA operatives played interchangeably by Wes Chatham, Jake Choi, Augusto Aguilera, and Grant Harvey, who in turn play by their own rules. The team just lost one of their own, whose gap on the squad is being filled by beardless newcomer Clay (Quincy Isaiah), but that’s not holding them back from exercising some of their anger on the locals. Lest anyone in the chain of command complain, they’ve got to take it up with their migraine-suffering boss Larry (Liam Neeson), a man who exists so that when an outraged officer yells “What the fuck is he doing?” he can snap back, “His job!”
None of this has much bearing on the two hours that follows, but it does set the tone appropriately: This is going to be a quagmire of a film, often going over the edge of being outright despicable (made with the kind of geopolitical tact one might expect from a filmmaker who condemned Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars speech), where genre shorthand and military lingo stand in for substance.
There’s a single image that runs counter to this: When the film jumps to the present, back in America after an unspecified amount of time, its first setting is a gas station. Is that the sum total of what these fighters were spilling blood over in the Middle East? Traumatizing themselves and losing limbs and wreaking havoc for the oil companies? The rest of The Fix seems to prove this juxtaposition a mere coincidence, but for a moment, it seems like it might have something on its mind about the minds of its subjects. But no, the main mind in question is Larry’s, and only then for plot purposes; since Kabul, he’s suffered some sort of mental deterioration that’s leading him to divulge classified information to everyone he’s around, specifically, information about $25 million in forgotten government funds, stuffed in a wall in “Hotel Tehran” back in the early ’80s.
Tucker gets wind of this and figures, hey, let’s get the ol’ discharged-and-disgraced gang back together (without Larry, apologies to anyone who was geezer-teased by Neeson’s name) for one last score. All this group of mercs needs to do is rescue an old-timer intelligence asset’s endangered daughter, stuck in Iran, and then they’ll get the exact location of the cash. Just like the first half-hour, which feints at getting into the weeds of a wholly unrelated mission, this part of the script is an impressive contradiction: convoluted yet simpleminded. The rescue and heists are barely thought through, and the rushed developments surrounding them on either side are slapdash; The Fix spends most of its 120 minutes commuting, dithering, posturing, and explaining, ending it all with an open door just in case America’s highest-belted and most-wraparound-shaded dads see this thing in droves.
The elements luring the jorts crowd in are those that make The Fix hardest to watch. When Tucker’s recruiter ex-wife Sophie (Annet Mahendru) helps them rope in the final member of their Ocean’s Handful—Zara (Elnaaz Norouzi), who’s posing as Tucker’s Persian wife—it’s clear she’s there for the same purpose as all the film’s women: To get threatened, get killed, or get her shirt off. Odds are, like the first woman onscreen in The Fix, it’ll be all three. The misogyny is only matched by the xenophobia, which feels especially gross given that America is currently bombing weddings in Iran (The Fix was filmed in 2024). As the ensemble stiffly idles in the piss-yellow overcast of cinema’s stereotypical Middle East, open firing on anyone and everyone under the goofy anti-American billboards, Tucker identifies anyone in their way as “fair game.”
These hapless baddies are killed by ramshackle gunfire, cheap-looking explosions, and worse-looking CG drones—the latter so cartoonish it looks like the VeggieTales succumbed to the surveillance state. If those doing the fighting had anything going on beyond their costumes, this abject ugliness could be easier to forgive. But the characters blur together and none of the performances are anything at all, though Levi’s constipated tough guy is a net negative instead of simply being empty air; it all means that ostensible heroes merge into an amorphous blob of congealed testosterone.
Expecting much else from a movie that opens with a Bible passage—especially the passage “You will hear of wars and reports of wars; see that you are not alarmed, for these things must happen, but it will not yet be the end”—does seem a fool’s errand, almost as foolish as gunning through Tehran in search of loot. The best thing you can say about The Fix is that its hawkishness, and its star-spangled greed, has proven timely.
Director: Guy Moshe
Writer: Guy Moshe, Mark Bacci, Ron Hutchinson
Starring: Liam Neeson, Zachary Levi, Elnaaz Norouzi
Release Date: September 11, 2026
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