“Drama is easy. Comedy’s hard,” in the words of director Peter Bogdanovich to British paper The Guardian in 2014.
Zachary Levi created a likable comic persona in Chuck, a likable light comedy/adventure that put him on the entertainment map from 2007-2012, leading eventually to the comic adventure Shazam!, in which he played a similar type of protagonist, one who was initially overwhelmed by new circumstances, and then overcame his self-doubts to become a convincing hero.
As director Bogdanovich said, Levi had done the hard thing by playing comic roles with a deft hand. For Levi, though, drama is not easy, as evidenced in his latest feature, The Fix.
Written by Guy Moshe, Mark Bacci, and Ron Hutchison, and directed by Guy Moshe, The Fix opens in Kabul, Afghanistan, as the U.S. military was withdrawing from the country in 2021. On the ground, Tucker (Zachary Levi) leads a mission to rescue a valuable local, which does not end well. As the squad speeds out of town, Tucker’s CIA handler, Larry (Liam Neeson), is disgusted by how things turned out.
Some time later, Tucker is still adjusting to civilian life in the U.S. When he receives a call to visit Larry, he is saddened to find a broken man who appears to be suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. Even so, in private, Larry speaks to Tucker about a huge sum of money — some $25 million in cash — that was buried in a wall in what Larry calls “Hotel Tehran,” way back in 1981, or about the time that American hostages were finally released.
Mystified though intrigued, Tucker begins investigating, and becomes convinced that Larry’s woozy recollection may, in fact, be true, which leads him to round up his old squad and head to Iran to verify the truth about “Hotel Tehran” and its location. Tucker contacts “someone who knows,” but she will only reveal the location if Tucker and his friends first rescue an activist Maryam (Lara Wolf), whose life is in danger.
As part of the increasingly complicated plan, Tucker decides they need someone to pose as his wife, so they won’t draw as much suspicion. They find Zara (Elnaaz Norouzi), who fits the bill, though she seems more interested in flirting with Tucker than taking it all seriously.
With all the pieces in place, the mission begins, first with stealth, then with more and more gun-blasting action. What begins as a straightforward riff on Kelly’s Heroes (1970), in which Clint Eastwood and his friends crossed enemy lines in World War II to enrich themselves by stealing treasures that the Nazis had stolen, transforms into a dramatic thriller, with a soupcon of regret and recrimination by Tucker, and to a lesser action, his squad, as they contemplate the consequences of their actions, and of the military in a losing battle.
Ostensibly, the film is more interested in the emotional consequences, which may explain why it plays so fast and easy with true events.
Spoiler below:
Eventually, the film revolves around evidence whose disclosure would rock Iran and the U.S. The only problem: that evidence was made public in 2016, at least five years before the events in The Fix.
End spoiler.
The focus on the characters helps set the film apart from other, more routine military action thrillers. Yet the balance is not quite right: The Fix still favors the action sequences.
If the performances fully brought the characters to life, then it would be a different story. And here is where Zachary Levi could have helped: His character is the moral center of the film.
Instead of being a solid anchor, though, he is a leaden deadweight, so focused on being “dramatic” and not funny in the least, that he completely drains his character of any charm or charisma. Sure, he shoot weapons effectively and fight people with brutal efficiency, yet he only leads by example, not by his words, which puts a damper on every dramatic scene because it’s difficult to believe his squad would follow him, especially when the target keeps moving and the consequences change.
As it is, The Fix feints in the right direction, but can’t quite land its punch.
The film opens Friday, September 11, throughout Dallas and Fort Worth, only in movie theaters. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.
Dallas Film Now. 
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