Michael Keaton Forgets Himself in the Disappointing Knox Goes Away

Is there something Michael Keaton isn’t telling us? For his first film as a director, The Merry Gentleman, he played a hitman befriended by a troubled younger woman. For his follow-up, Knox Goes Away, Keaton again plays a hired gun, this time afflicted with an Alzheimer’s-like illness that gives him the movie-world contract killer’s special: a ticking clock on his own expiration. Even stranger, Keaton isn’t particularly known for playing hitmen outside of these movies, though he stole some scenes in the fun Maggie Q-led programmer The Protégé. He excels at scheming, talking and thinking, and while his John Knox can do all three, he does so quietly, especially as his mind refuses to keep pace with his body. Keaton seems to take another hitman part as an opportunity for contemplation, a decision that leaves Knox Goes Away feeling like someone hollowed out a DTV thriller in hopes of finding existential despair in the empty spaces.

Faced with a diagnosis of his own imminent demise, Knox begins to make arrangements to “cash out,” converting his various stashed-away assets into money that can be left to his estranged family, including an ex-wife (Marcia Gay Harden) and a seemingly mild-mannered son Miles (James Marsden). He enlists avuncular if shady handler Xavier (Al Pacino) to help with his plan, but Knox, despite his faltering memory, must take a more hands-on role when Miles unexpectedly approaches him with an unusual problem. Miles’s teenager daughter has been impregnated by a man several decades her senior, and Miles, intending to confront the man, wound up stabbing him to death. The man himself is of little consequence – a predator and, for good measure, a neo-Nazi, who Knox notes he would have happily killed given the chance – but Miles needs his dad’s help to cover up his crime.

Knox’s mission and his health should create a series of irrefutable deadlines bearing down on the story; Keaton seems to realize this with a contrived opening shot, where a number of objects are laid out on a table and then collected – except, conspicuously, a loudly ticking watch, which an unseen Knox comes back to retrieve. Yet despite the fact that Knox is given weeks, not months, to live, the movie proceeds to weirdly undersell his worsening condition. Three weeks into his diagnosis, and Knox is still becoming gradually more disoriented rather than reaching more familiar end stages his doctor has promised. It’s part of a very Hollywood impulse, wanting to deal with the symbolism and “psychology” of dementia more than the physical reality, and turning a harrowing condition into a po-faced gimmick in the process.