The Fix

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. And it leaves more than a couple of charismatic young actors, including Quincy Isaiah and Lara Wolf, adrift.

In the long run it falls short of its own tangled ambitions. But Moshe and co. do make these nearly two-and-a-half hours pass in diverting if not terrifically suspenseful fashion.

The movie, directed by Guy Moshe, is never boring, but it demands considerable willingness to suspend your disbelief and knowledge of current conflicts abroad.

This is a filmmaker who simply doesn’t know when to stop, as also evidenced by the film’s bloated 142-minute running time that lets narrative tedium set in.

Co-writer and director Guy Moshe's genre cocktail mixes elements from war movies and espionage thrillers with some visual and tonal influences from Westerns, and when one of those rises to the top, things tend to click into place. When a firefight suddenly breaks out, or when the spy plot's endgame kicks off a flurry of activity, it feels as if the movie suddenly wakes up. Unfortunately, that does imply it spends most of its time asleep.

The best thing you can say about The Fix is that its hawkishness, and its star-spangled greed, has proven timely.

I suspect Levi was trying to adopt the thousand-yard stare of a traumatized man who’s seen too much violence, but Levi’s so rigid he just looks like he’s frozen, as if a Tyrannosaurus is watching and can sense his every movement.