The Fix Review: Liam Neeson Does the Work, the Script Fumbles the Goods

The Fix is worth one long flashback and a patient performance from Liam Neeson. Guy Moshe's Tehran heist has a real moral spine, a cast that can play it, and a Kabul sequence that lands hard, and then it spends the rest of its 142 minutes explaining itself. Critics were unkind about it. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 16 percent from 31 reviews and Metacritic sits at 37 from 7 critic reviews, both checked on October 21, 2026.

The film opened in US cinemas through Inaugural Entertainment on September 11, 2026, runs 142 minutes and carries an R rating for language, strong bloody violence and some nudity. The Numbers, checked on October 21, 2026, has it at $1,184,543 domestic and $1,219,375 worldwide. It was originally called Hotel Tehran, and it is based on an original idea by Bazzel Baz, a former CIA Intelligence Special Operations Group officer.

Spoiler-free verdict: Watch it for Liam Neeson, for Quincy Isaiah, and for one flashback that explains why a heist is not really a heist. Skip the rest. A 142-minute, R-rated action thriller with 16 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 31 critic reviews as of October 21, 2026, and 37 on Metacritic. You need no plot summary before pressing play.

What The Fix is about

In 2021, in the last days of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, a CIA special-operations team led by Tucker (Zachary Levi) is sent into Kabul to pull out a local asset. Their handler Larry (Neeson) has gone off-book trying to protect a second contact, and the operation goes wrong in a way the men cannot stop talking about. The team comes home pushed aside, without a medal, without a pension and without a name for what they did.

Several years on, Tucker's old handler is the one who breaks first. Larry has advanced dementia, and in one of his lucid windows he lets slip that there is $25 million in the wall of Room 705 of the Hotel Tehran, left over from an operation in 1981. That is the score. The only person who can say where the money is buried is an Iranian dissident living in exile in Paris, and her condition is that they pull her daughter Maryam (Lara Wolf) out of Iran before the Revolutionary Guard gets to her.

Tucker assembles the old unit: Alex (Wes Chatham), Charlie (Jake Choi), Bruce (Augusto Aguilera) and Matt (Grant Harvey), plus Clay (Quincy Isaiah), the young sniper who joined too late in Kabul and has never stopped looking up to Tucker. Two of them made their money in NFTs and bankroll the trip. Tucker travels as a New Zealand businessman in the rug trade. Elnaaz Norouzi plays Zara, the cover wife he drafts for the job: born in Iran, in Germany from the age of eight and in the United States since she was fourteen, Farsi-fluent, and clear that when Tucker asks whether she is American or Iranian, the answer is Persian.

And then the film goes to Tehran, and Tehran goes on for a long time.

Cast and performances

Neeson is the reason to go. Larry spends most of the film in a chair, failing to remember where he is, and Neeson makes every one of those scenes hurt, because the man is still operating, still making calls, still holding the map. The Hollywood Reporter's Frank Scheck opened on the performance, writing that "It's Saigon all over again," glowers Liam Neeson early in Guy Moshe's action-thriller The Fix, and pointing out that Larry is shown suffering from debilitating migraine headaches.

Zachary Levi is the film's problem. ScreenRant thought so, and so did TheWrap's William Bibbiani, who wrote that "Levi's so rigid he just looks like he's frozen, as if a Tyrannosaurus is watching and can sense his every movement." ScreenRant's verdict on the casting is that "as a screen presence, he's far more successful when leaning into personality, which this role virtually drains him of entirely." The character has no interiority on screen, so the film asks the audience to read a hundred and forty minutes of muscle.

Quincy Isaiah is the best of the younger cast and the only one who seems to be thinking. Clay starts the film as a fan of Tucker and ends it having watched the man he looked up to make a series of calculations with other people's lives.

Annet Mahendru plays Tucker's wife Sophie, and she is the only person in the film who gets to be angry at him for what the job did to them. Titus Welliver turns up as Larry's old associate James, Navid Negahban is the Revolutionary Guard officer who runs the opposition, and Numan Acar plays Nadir, a gangster based in Baku who brokers the crossing into Azerbaijan that the team needs to get out.

What works

The flashback. The 2021 Kabul operation is the best-written thing in the film, and it is the reason the rest of the film exists. ScreenRant called the setup a good one, and the sequence that follows it, a squad that was told to stand down and then had to decide for themselves, is the only part of the movie where the writing and the ethics land on the same frame.

Neeson and Isaiah. Isaiah plays Clay as a man physically wrecked by a decision he was told to make, and his argument with Tucker in the last third, the one about whether the mission outranks the people doing it, is the only sustained piece of dialogue in the film that sounds like two people thinking.

The action. Scheck noted that the film "aspires to classic Hollywood action movie status," and when it tries, it works. The third act has a firefight in a tunnel that is genuinely tense.

What doesn't

The dialogue. RogerEbert.com's Glenn Kenny, who gave it two stars out of four, asked the question the film answers in the negative: "Was this dialogue written by ChatGPT?" He also noted the film's opening, the New American Bible version of the verse from Matthew about "war, and rumors of war," which "strikes a profound note that the picture itself... can't quite live up to." ScreenRant found the same fault in the seams: whenever a scene has a plot to push, "it's usually clunky."

The runtime. The team does not reach Iran until almost an hour in, by ScreenRant's count, and Keith & the Movies put the length at 141 minutes and called the payoff "overstuffed." Aaron Neuwirth of We Live Entertainment gave it three out of ten and said it plainly: "Nothing comes together as well as it needs to to support a 140-minute thriller that comes up lacking in so many ways."

The heist. Kenny wrote that "as a buddy picture, it chokes on relationships; as a heist picture, it fumbles the goods; and as an international geopolitical thriller, it doesn't come close to sticking a landing." Variety's Dennis Harvey, who was warmer about the rest, still found the whole thing "polished, somewhat ungainly" and "an entertaining yet less-than-fully satisfying mix of macho action heroics and convoluted espionage intrigue." There is also a timing problem the film cannot fix. It was shot well before the current US and Iran conflict began, as Harvey noted, and The Fix has the air of a thriller written for a world that has since moved on.

What audiences say

The audience numbers are small and they are kind. Rotten Tomatoes has the Tomatometer at 16 percent from 31 reviews and the Popcornmeter at 75 percent from more than 100 verified ratings, a fifty-nine point gap between the two. Metacritic's metascore is 37 from 7 critic reviews, labelled "Generally Unfavorable," with a user score of 5.4 from 7 ratings.

Letterboxd's member average is 2.47 from 2,188 ratings and 808 written reviews. TMDB has the film at 6.61 from 70 votes. Every figure in this section was checked on October 21, 2026. With 31 critic reviews and 70 TMDB votes, this is a thin record, and the reviewers who did show up mostly did not like it.

Where to watch The Fix

The Fix came off the screen and went straight to the digital shelf on October 13, 2026. JustWatch searched 376 streaming services on October 21, 2026 and lists it to buy on Amazon Video, Apple TV Store and Fandango At Home, and to rent on Amazon Video, Fandango At Home and Apple TV Store, with no free option anywhere. Its search page priced the rental at $19.99 and the purchase at $24.99. TMDB's US provider list agrees.

Current availability, cast details and member reviews sit on our The Fix streaming options and member reviews page.

Verdict

Is The Fix worth watching? For Neeson, for Isaiah, and for a flashback that makes the whole Tehran business make sense, yes, and you can watch those parts on their own. For a movie with $25 million in it, a genuine crisis of conscience and a cast of people who can act, no. Rotten Tomatoes' 16 percent is a fair verdict on a film that spends two hours and twenty minutes on a two-hour and twenty-minute problem. It could have been ninety minutes, and a little more of Isaiah and a little less of the loudest dialogue, and it would have had something to say.

Spoiler warning: the ending of The Fix

The ending turns on a decision made in Kabul in 2021. The asset the team went in for is called Hamid, and the order from upstairs was to stand down on him. He was captured anyway. Tucker could not let a man be taken and tortured, so he made the call himself, and the man's family died in the chaos around it, and Clay lost a leg trying to save somebody else. Nobody in the film ever counts the dead that night. They just keep saying the words "Hamid" and "Kabul" and going quiet.

So when the team is abandoned in Tehran, with no extraction coming and their own government deciding that a rogue operation is easier to erase than to admit, Clay has to decide what loyalty means. Tucker tells him the philosophy he has lived by: the mission is king, and if a life has to be spent, it is spent. Clay has spent a year trying to get to that level. In the last third he decides it is the wrong level, and it costs him. Clay is killed in the escape, and Tucker is the one who has to finish without him.

Tucker gets out. There is no medal, no ceremony, nobody from Washington arriving to say it was worth it, and the money never becomes a celebration. Then Larry, in what is left of his mind, tells Tucker the truth: the cash was not in one wall. "We DID stash millions all over that city, just not all in one wall." And the reason Larry let the whole thing run is that saving Maryam was the only cure for what happened to Hamid. The last thing he says is "Come back home, son."

The last scene is at home. Sophie is there and their son Troy comes down the stairs. He says he has been thinking about going fishing. Then he says he has been thinking that his father could teach him how to shoot. Harry Nilsson's "Time Will Say Nothing But I Told You So" plays over the credits, and the film ends there.