Zachary Levi gets a gritty and intense lead role while Liam Neeson steps away from the frontline for a supporting turn in the action-thriller “The Fix”. Written, directed, and produced by Guy Moshe, “The Fix” is an unexpectedly dense and layered feature that tries to cover too much ground but that manages to keep us glued to the screen every step of its long and winding way. It may be a little lengthy at 141 minutes. But there’s no downtime and the story is steadily moving forward.

“The Fix” is a genre mashup made up of equal parts military actioner, espionage thriller, and heist movie. Moshe blends these ingredients into something routinely compelling and often thrilling. It tells a story that features so many moving parts that keeping up with them can be a bit demanding. And it can be too mechanical in its efforts to move us from one point to the next, sometimes leaving emotions feeling like an afterthought. At the same time, I found myself locked in for the duration.

The story opens in 2021 as the United States scrambles to withdrawal its forces from Afghanistan. During the debacle, a team of CIA operatives are summoned to Kabul by their handler, Larry (Neeson). Led by their stern but trustworthy leader Tucker (Levi), the operatives are given an undercover mission to retrieve a valuable local asset from a town heavily occupied by the Taliban. But the mission gets messy and Tucker’s squad find themselves in over their heads.

A few years pass and the story takes us back in the States where Tucker and his team have left active duty and went back to their civilian lives. Tucker pays a visit to Larry who is homebound while battling dementia. As they visit, Larry begins speaking in remarkable detail about a secret mission from 1981. More specifically, he talks about $25 million stashed in the wall of Room 705 of the Hotel Tehran in Iran.

After confirming the Iranian mission with Larry’s associate (Titus Welliver), Tucker calls on his old squad for a crazy yet potentially lucrative heist. To pull it off, they’ll need to slip into Iran, find the hotel, and retrieve the money that Larry insists is still there. Of course none of those steps are as easy as they sound. Getting into and around Iran will require trusting several strangers on the inside. Learning the unknown location of the undocumented Hotel Tehran requires a side mission that adds more danger. And once there, who knows what Tucker and his team will find?

As expected for a movie of this scope and scale, there are a number of supporting characters who factor into the story. Quincy Isaiah plays a young hotshot sniper who is new to Tucker’s team. Elnaaz Norouzi plays an Iranian American who Tucker recruits to pose as his wife. Lara Wolf plays a humanitarian activist being hunted by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Numan Acar plays an Iranian mobster with deep connections. And Navid Negahban plays a high-ranking leader in the Revolutionary Guard who becomes the film’s chief antagonist.

Neeson vanishes for most of the film’s second half as the story’s boots-on-the-ground focus shifts almost exclusively to Tucker and his team (believably played by Isaiah, Jake Choi, Wes Chatham, and Augusto Aguilera). Moshe’s script offers up an intriguing balance of geopolitical tension and classic heist movie mechanics. He definitely takes his time laying out their plan and defining the stakes. But you never lose interest thanks to the steady pacing and buildup.

As far as the action scenes, Moshe shoots them in ways that are both intense, immersive, and thrilling. They help energize the path to the film’s overstuffed payoff that tries to tie-up too many loose ends in one neat and tidy finish. Yet it’s a satisfying enough ending for a movie that covers so much ground and entertains nearly every step of the way. Neeson makes the most of his limited screentime and Levi does well in a role that’s grittier and studier than anything he has taken on to date.

VERDICT – 3.5 STARS