Guy Moshe is a director that has a lot of potential. He showed it with his visually stunning brawler, Bunraku, which looked like a comic book and Japanese stageplay come to life. That film was derailed by a shocking lack of momentum when the action cooled off, and it’s a problem that has followed Moshe to his latest, The Fix, a military thriller led by Zachary Levi and Liam Neeson. The bones of a great movie are in here, but it’s one that would need to be about an hour shorter, leaning more into the explosive conflicts and heist aspects than questions of morality and half-hearted plot twists.
Levi plays Tucker, a special forces operative in Afghanistan, with Neeson as his supervisor, Larry. When a mission in Kabul to extract a CIA asset goes south, both Tucker and Larry are left disillusioned. Larry, who was already suffering from debilitating migraines, is found to have an advanced form of dementia. Years later, when Tucker goes to visit his old boss, Larry is lucid enough to remember $25M in cash that he left stashed away in Hotel Tehran (the film’s original title, btw), and is presumably still there. Tucker, still angry over what happened and separated from his family, rounds up the old crew to retrieve that money from what is essentially a heavily-armed fortress.
The opening action sequence shows Moshe’s knack for crafting compelling warfare. The chaos is a bit dizzying, but controlled enough that you can always keep track of Tucker and his squad. That’s not the issue. The screeplay co-written by Moshe is an overcomplicated mess that could have been broken down into several different movies. A former CIA asset knows the money’s location, but she will only hand it over when Tucker rescues her daughter, an anti-regime activist, who is being held captive. To help build his cover story, Tucker enlists Zara (Elnaaz Norouzi), a flirty Iranian-American young woman, to portray his wife. Predictably, things get hot and steamy between the two while in close quarters, which only snowballs into a rash of other poor decisioins that keep Zara in harm’s way longer than necessary.
There are other curveballs that Moshe throws at the wall, from betrayals to double agents to the unveiling of a larger conspiracy, none of them packing much of a punch. They exist merely to break you from the tedious conversations and thin ruminations on the cost of war, and the price paid when governments break their promises. Clocking in at over 2 1/2 hours, The Fix would’ve been better served as a 95-minute snatch ‘n grab movie, but Moshe, who served in the Israeli military himself, clearly has a lot he wants to get off of his chest. Normally, I’m all for a filmmaker who isn’t afraid to say what’s on their mind, but not at the expense of telling a better story.
The Fix opens in theaters September 11th.
