Liam Neeson and Zachary Levi’s New Action Thriller ‘The Fix’ Is Getting Torched by Critics on Rotten Tomatoes

Liam Neeson has built an entire late-career cottage industry out of gruff action thrillers, and this week he’s teaming up with ‘Shazam!’ star Zachary Levi for another entry in that well-worn genre. ‘The Fix’ arrived in theaters on September 11, promising the kind of gritty, globe-trotting mission audiences have come to expect from a Neeson vehicle.

Directed by Guy Moshe, the film follows a group of disgraced, war-weary ex-CIA operators mentored by Neeson’s character Larry and led by Levi’s Tucker. After a rescue mission in Afghanistan goes catastrophically wrong, the team heads into Tehran hoping to pull off one last job and find some measure of redemption along the way.

Unfortunately for the cast, that redemption arc doesn’t seem to be extending to the reviews. ‘The Fix‘ has opened with a dismal 10 percent score on the Tomatometer based on 21 reviews, putting it firmly in “rotten” territory before it’s even had a full weekend in theaters.

The plot kicks off in Kabul in 2021, where Tucker’s team is sent to extract an informant and his family during the chaotic US withdrawal. According to a review from The Hollywood Reporter, the operation collapses into disaster almost immediately, leaving Neeson’s Larry to spiral into migraines and memory problems that haunt him for the rest of the film.

Years later, the same crew gets pulled back together for a high-stakes job in Tehran, where an Iranian former CIA asset holds the location of a hidden fortune. Per The Hollywood Reporter, she agrees to talk only if Tucker rescues her anti-Revolutionary Guard activist daughter from the country during the extraction, setting up the film’s central heist-meets-rescue premise.

That setup has not landed well with critics across the board. Variety’s review called the film’s journey from Kabul to Tehran convoluted, arguing the movie never finds the cogent political or emotional payoff it seems to be reaching for.

Several reviewers singled out Levi’s performance as the film’s strongest element even as they picked apart everything around him. JoBlo’s review noted that Levi plays Tucker as cold and calculated, and argued that whatever issues exist with the character come from the writing rather than the actor’s work.

ScreenRant was more mixed on Levi specifically, while still praising the film’s setup involving Quincy Isaiah’s hotshot sniper character Clay and the personal stakes of the botched Kabul mission. TheWrap, on the other hand, was far less forgiving, describing Levi’s performance as stiff and comparing his wide-eyed stare throughout the film to someone frozen in place.

Neeson doesn’t escape criticism either. FandomWire‘s review noted the film throws so many twists and red herrings at viewers in its final stretch that the narrative starts to feel incoherent, adding that none of the late reveals meaningfully move the story forward. Flickering Myth went further, taking issue with how the film handles its opening war sequence and broader depiction of the conflict.

Punch Drunk Critics summed up a common thread running through the reviews, arguing that director Guy Moshe’s film has the bones of something stronger buried inside an overstuffed runtime that leans too heavily into moral musings instead of its action and heist elements. At 2 hours and 22 minutes, several critics flagged the pacing as a major culprit behind the film’s stumbles.

For Neeson fans hoping for another late-career action gem in the vein of his better-reviewed thrillers, ‘The Fix’ looks like it’s landing closer to the bottom of that pile. Whether audiences agree with critics once the Popcornmeter fills in remains to be seen, since the film currently has fewer than 50 verified user ratings.

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