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.
There is one concession to realism in Knox Goes Away that doesn’t depend purely on convenience: Because this is a movie about a retirement-aged hitman suffering from dementia, there isn’t much mindless action – or, save a few scuffles and bullets, any action at all. (Perhaps to the degree that it’s worth questioning why Knox needs to be a hitman at all for this story to work.) Keaton, laboring to generate some shadowy mood from his dimly lit settings, emphasizes the amusingly quotidian details of Knox’s lifestyle: the disposable, vaguely rubbery-looking diner steak; the blaring flatscreen TV at a criminal’s office that makes it look like any other low-rent business; and the occasional departures into weirder sights, like Al Pacino eating Chinese food in a bathtub, like he’s recreating that scene from Gummo.
It’s fun, too, watching Pacino trade hushed strategies with Keaton, even if some of their exchanges (like Xavier’s repeated reminders that Knox should leave his phone unlocked, in case he forgets his passcode) wind up sounding like clues or hints that don’t fully pay off. Knox Goes Away could almost work as a hangout movie, if anyone inside of it seemed especially interested in hanging out. Instead, the movie keeps cutting to a group of standard-issue cops led by a world-weary Suzy Nakamura, trying to piece together some murders, circling the Knox family at what seems like an awfully slow speed. In the end, there just isn’t all that much going on in Knox Goes Away, which feints toward some grander plan or tragic mistake, only to muddle through a largely shrugworthy conclusion that doesn’t seem to require 100-plus minutes of build-up.
Despite all that time spent, the regret hanging in the scenes between Knox and his son feels perfunctory. One of the best things about many Keaton performances is how we get to watch him think, so it makes sense that Knox Goes Away tries to wring some suspense over what or how he’s thinking. Less explicable is how the dimming of Michael Keaton’s lights somehow feels like such a meager non-event.
Director: Michael Keaton
Writer: Gregory Poirier
Starring: Michael Keaton, James Marsden, Al Pacino, Suzy Nakamura, Joanna Kulig
Release Date: March 15, 2024
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.