Chatter Box Film

The Fix is a 2024 science-fiction action movie directed by Kelsey Egan.

It is unfortunately a stale dystopian plot where the air is becoming toxic to breathe, causing people to wear masks and companies and illegal groups appear to be capitalizing on this disaster. It is somewhat hyper-realistic in this capitalist aspect and the mask scenes in public reminded me too much of experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic, except there’s also a generic mutation element added to the story.

This film mostly drags on; the story spends too long building momentum, getting to the second half of the movie out of a 1 hour and 38 minute film, it seemed to slightly pick up although the character “Ella” played by Grace Van Dien (Stranger Things) still hasn’t done much with the mutation… only closer to the end there’s some good stunt scenes.

Although, there just wasn’t enough interesting scenes and the acting felt overdone throughout; the performances were not convincing enough or any of the characters likeable to make me care about them. Relationships between the characters seemed underdeveloped.

The strongest parts of this film is the make-up and CG work. The VFX department working on composits for mutated elements, holograms and other futuristic tech, as well as the make up department applying prosthetics, that’s certainly great work there!

There are noticeable errors in one scene with the antagonist played by Daniel Sharman, whose hands are on the desk scrolling on a computer, then it switched betwee wide and close up shots and his hands in the wider shot kept going back to being in a different place, back and forth, it’s something that should have been picked up on while filming.

[Spoiler]:

It would have been more interesting for Grace’s character to be mutated into her final form much earlier in the film. Regardless of this, the ending of the film isn’t satisfying enough for what the story was suppose to be about as it was left open to either “adapt or die” instead of just solving the air quality issue by stopping these businesses damaging it.

Overall, The Fix is not a very interesting plot, there’s lackluster performances and rough sound design, it would have also benefited from stronger character development and more action scenes, although for an independent film it’s strengths were surprisingly in VFX/make-up.