A handful of disgraced ex-CIA operatives try to make amends—and make a great deal of money—by taking on a new mission in Iran. The film talks about sin and redemption, but it does so in violent, bloody and cuss-filled ways. Throw in some nudity, and families can nix The Fix.
Writer Mike Malloy once wrote that Afghanistan is “where empires go to die.”
Tucker doesn’t know much about the death of empires. He was just the guy on the ground. But in his own tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2021, he saw plenty of other things die: his friends. His career. Part of his soul, maybe.
He led a CIA ops mission that went very wrong: Ordered to kill an American asset who’d fallen into the wrong hands, Tucker had tried to save the man and his family instead. His CIA boss, Larry, went rogue to rescue his own source—and he failed, too. And then, for all their trouble, Larry, Tucker and team were summarily drummed out of the service, cut loose and cast aside.
More than a year later, Tucker’s still struggling. He fell into a dark mental space when he came home. He’s steered clear of most everyone in his life, including his preteen son.
But when Larry’s wife, Gina, calls to ask for help, Tucker makes a beeline to his old boss—only to find that Larry is failing, both physically and mentally. Looking back, Tucker feels like the process began in Afghanistan: the migraines, the bitter babbling, the Quixotic quest to save an old source. But now, Larry’s bedridden, often unable to remember who his wife is.
Gina hoped that Larry might remember Tucker. Instead, Larry thinks he’s “Thomas,” an old CIA chum. “I haven’t seen you since Tehran!” he says. Larry begins reminiscing about how the two of them, with an Iranian activist named Fariba, spent all night digging into a wall in Hotel Tehran, hiding $25 million for “the counterrevolution.”
And then Larry turns wistful. There wasn’t going to be any counterrevolution, he says sadly. Not in 1981.
“And then you died on me, Thomas,” Larry adds. Looking at Tucker, eyes filled with fear and confusion, he cries, “You’re dead, Thomas!”
And so the visit ends, just as Afghanistan had—in waves of fear and confusion and portents of death. But Tucker takes away more than another sad memory.
Hotel Tehran. $25 million.
What if the hotel still exists? What if the cash is still hidden? That money would right a lot of wrongs for him and his discredited team.
Afghanistan may be where empires go to die. But Iran? Perhaps that’s where Tucker and his old friends can be reborn.
After Tucker and Larry return to the States—but before Larry’s mind really starts to fade—Larry shares a thought that Tucker takes to heart: “In the future, if you get an opportunity to do good, cherish it,” Larry says.
In the past, Tucker followed a lot of orders that were (he was told) good for the country, but the moral calculus was difficult at best. This new mission, he’s under no orders, and he’s given an opportunity to do some real good: to save an Iranian activist and journalist (and maybe some other folks, too).
In so doing, Tucker hopes to redeem himself—in his own eyes, at least. And that’s important, because if Tucker feels like he’s an OK human being, that opens the door for him to feel worthy of seeing his son. The boy’s mother, Sophie, reminds Tucker that their son needs him.
“Peter’s great,” Sophie says of her new husband. “But you’re [the boy’s] father. You need to figure this out.”
This is not to say that Tucker and his team are free of moral quandaries. The Fix contains pools of murky ethical waters to navigate (and the convoluted plot doesn’t make those waters any easier for the viewer to paddle through, either). But The Fix insists this is a chance at redemption for Tucker and his team—a chance for them to wash their hands of their past acts and do some real, unadulterated good for a change. (Indeed, Tucker puts much of the mission on hold to try and rescue an innocent civilian who he believes is being captured and tortured by the Iranian regime.)
If they’re successful in recovering the money, Tucker and his team hope to give a good chunk of that cash to a former cohort of theirs who lost a leg in their last official mission together; the money could pay for a new operation to help his rehabilitation process.
Dozens of people, civilians and operatives alike, risk their lives for others.
The movie suggests that Larry is a man of faith. It’s one of the reasons that his murky work plagues him so. When Larry fails to save his source, Tucker finds Larry praying beside the dead body, reciting and repeating the Jesus Prayer. (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”) During the mission, Larry wishes Tucker “Godspeed.” And when Larry talks about cherishing the opportunity to do good, he adds, “It all goes in the Book.” (While such a book of good deeds is not part of actual Christian doctrine, it’s a part of Christian lore—Peter with his book in front of heaven’s pearly gates.)
The mission into Iran requires Tucker to take a “wife” into the country (to allay suspicions, we’re told), and one of the applicants, Zara, comes in wearing a pair of crosses around her neck. She notes that she was born in Iran but identifies herself as Persian. “In my house, we spit on the current [fundamentalist Islamic] regime,” she says.
Obviously, that fundamentalist Islamic regime is a prime player in The Fix—and the reason why so many people need rescuing. A television reporter talks about how a handful of women have been captured by the state and found guilty for “offenses against God.” Women in the country always cover their hair (by law), and we see people in black, head-to-toe burkas. One character professes a willingness to give everything to Iran—and, by extension, the Shiite faith that rules it.
The movie begins with a title card quoting Matthew 24:6-8, courtesy the New American Bible translation: You will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end … Someone also quotes John 8:32: “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
Zara eventually wins the “job” of becoming Tucker’s wife and apparently enters into a legal, binding union with him. (During the application process, it’s described as the equivalent of marrying someone for a Green Card.) But Zara also appears to be rather attracted to Tucker, and she makes overtures toward him during their stay in Iran—some subtle, some more overt. In one scene, she removes her shirt as she walks away from Tucker, revealing her bare back and the side of one of her breasts.
We see the bare breasts of another woman—albeit a dead one. She apparently worked in an Afghanistan brothel, and she lays on a bed, a bloody hole in her head and her torso exposed. The brothel’s other workers and clientele have also been killed, and we see their corpses in several beds—sometimes entwined and showing some skin (but no actual nudity).
Two characters engage in heterosexual foreplay, kissing and embracing, before the camera leaves the scene. The woman’s backside is covered in underwear that reveals a lot of her rear. In another scene, she wears some lingerie-like shorts. (The couple in question kisses elsewhere, too.)
Tucker asks an Iranian woman why she supports the regime, considering how badly it treats women. “You want to save me so you can put me in a bikini and post me on Instagram?” she retorts. “What’s so great about the way your society treats women?”
As mentioned, some folks wear burkas. One of them happens to be a man working in disguise as part of his mission. We hear locker room-style jokes and references to sex, body parts and erectile dysfunction pills.
The Fix does not shy away from showing pain, death and wartime violence.
The majority of that violence takes place in Afghanistan. Dozens of people die in a firefight, many from bullets to the head. One man is hit by a car and run over, and the camera zooms on the victim’s bloody, disfigured face in the aftermath. Another man has his leg severed by bullets: The appendage goes flying, and the man suffers some serious agony as we’re treated to extended views of his bloody stump.
Perhaps more jarring is the aftermath, when Tucker goes into a building to find women and children shot to death, their bloody bodies lying on the floor. He and a teammate, Clay, find a survivor in a closet—a boy perhaps 5 or 6 years old. Clay wants to rescue the child, but Tucker says to leave him behind. “We might not make it back, and I don’t need another dead kid on my conscience,” he says. “He’s young. They’ll take him in. At least he’ll grow up on his own.”
A dozen or more combatants die in a shootout elsewhere. A drone crashes into and kills a man, leaving a shard of metal in his chest. Someone dies in an explosion. A handful of people are essentially executed—both by Iranians and Americans. Iranian officials shoot two women in the forehead when they’re not forthcoming with information. An interrogator sends Tucker a video of a woman, bloodied and sobbing. Americans bind, gag and threaten to blow up the family of an Iranian official.
Larry forces Tucker to make a lethal promise: If Larry starts “embarrassing” himself as his mind fades, he asks Tucker to give him a “respectable death.”
We hear some horrific stories. Tucker recounts how one time, when he tried to perform CPR on someone, the man’s chest essentially disintegrated, as if the ribs had melted. “I literally crushed his chest with my bare hands,” he says. He and Larry also talk about the torture techniques of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan—and what would’ve happened to a resource, and his family, if he had fallen into their hands.
A woman cuts her hand on some glass. Larry suffers from some migraines in Afghanistan. People threaten others with guns. A couple of people get into a physical tussle. Someone’s hit in the face, and we see the bruises for the rest of the film. Tucker’s own face sports several cuts in Afghanistan—shrapnel injuries, he explains to someone. (We hear that another teammate was caught in the same blast but did not survive.) A truck explodes. A blast rocks a building. A corpse hangs from a building crane. Someone’s hit in the gut with a rifle butt.
About 50 f-words and more than 20 s-words. We also hear “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “d–n,” “h—” and “pr–k.” God’s name is misused three times, all using the word “d–n.” Jesus’ name is also abused thrice.
Several people drink beer, and a group of people downs a round of shots. One of Tucker’s old teammates admits that his farm is struggling a bit: “I thought about growing cannabis,” he tells Tucker. Several people are seen smoking cigarettes.
Without getting too deep into The Fix’s muddled plot, the United States was, and is, up to some very questionable deeds in this movie—sacrificing expendable assets and working hard to keep some dark secrets buried. Loads of characters must weigh and make difficult choices.
A woman being hunted by the Iranian government would love nothing more than for the current regime to be replaced by a “socialist democracy.” Several people lie and mislead. Non-fungible tokens are called a “legal Ponzi scheme” by a couple of people who sell them. Someone wets her pants in fear.
Chalk one up for titular irony: The Fix is a bit broken.
Sure, it comes with some positives—and ones that viewers of faith can embrace. Themes of sin, forgiveness and redemption run deep here, and sometimes they come with a faith-tinged crucible. If you boil the story down to its essence, it’s about a bunch of flawed people trying to make better choices and do some good in the world. And that’s worth something.
But The Fix comes with a lot more than that essence. It gives us a convoluted, overly complicated story that sometimes seems to confuse itself. Though led by the charismatic Zachary Levi, The Fix squanders his likability and covers it in a mask of grim determination.
And then we must tackle the content issues: the bevy of bloody head shots, the flying limbs, the sense the movie tries to give us that we’re all so much meat. Add in the movie’s gratuitous nudity and ubiquitous foul language, and you’ve got a messy movie indeed.
The Fix was originally titled Hotel Tehran, which proves to be a really terrible place to stay, but The Fix itself is no garden spot, either. And if you’re looking for a good place to stay for, oh, two and a half hours, I can think of a lot more enjoyable environs.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
