Somehow, the “inside the mind of a contract killer/hitman” genre feels evergreen. Take a look at David Fincher’s The Killer from last year, which lets us peer into the life of an international assassin who is obsessed with a series of rules that he’s unable to actually follow. If the popularity of that film — or the ironically bulletproof John Wick franchise, or even Bill Hader’s pitch-black dramedy Barry — is any metric, people will never stop wanting to see the inside of a world that most certainly exists in our own, but that we simply won’t ever get to see.
As such, the premise of Michael Keaton’s second trip to the director’s chair, Knox Goes Away, should be batting a thousand. The premise is simple but intriguing: a lifelong hitman (played by Keaton) is diagnosed with a particularly aggressive kind of dementia and sets forth to help his estranged son (James Marsden) with a violent predicament he’s gotten himself into. If it sounds familiar, it may be because of the very similar 2022 Liam Neeson vehicle Memory (co-starring Guy Pearce, who feels a little on the nose for a movie about memory loss), or even the Dutch film it was based on, The Alzheimer’s Case. It’s a clever concept, and one can imagine it working extremely well in the hands of Fincher, or Martin McDonagh, or even Guy Ritchie in his Snatch/Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels prime.
And, for a while, Knox isn’t a bad film. Keaton brings a Wickian stoicism to the titular John “Aristotle” Knox, but with the added layer of being a bit more multifaceted. His apartment is full of heady books, he sees the same sex worker every Thursday, and he has a messy relationship with his son, Miles. It gets messier when, one night, Miles shows up asking for help with the corpse of the pedophile who impregnated his daughter. As the film spirals out from this explosive event in Knox’s life, we watch the fallout play out across seven weeks, his memory worsening constantly — even though it never seems to merit being discussed with the people around him. We see him struggle to remember names and places, but the rapid deterioration rarely causes more than a hiccup. Would it be fun to watch his life crumble? Of course not, but the fact that his memory fails him so infrequently dulls the film’s sense of urgency.
That lack of urgency feels like it infects every aspect of Knox Goes Away, like a massive chain reaction of missed opportunities and bad decisions. You see it in the bland cinematography and bloodless color palette. When we get glimpses of the detectives attempting to get to the bottom of the weird murders caused by Knox, we have to sit and listen to Suzy Nakamura chastise another detective for assuming the gender of the person who stabbed a white supremacist pedophile in the neck repeatedly. We get Al Pacino as one of Knox’s close friends and associates, but it doesn’t feel like Keaton and writer Gregory Poirier knew what to do with a character who could eat Chinese food in the bath so naturalistically. There are short bursts of action, but they’re over so fast that they need the shock of a neck being broken by a neurology textbook to stick in your mind. We see some cool visualization of Knox’s memory problems, but it feels half-developed, afraid to do a bad job with its depiction that it avoids any strong flavor at all.
Worst of all, it feels like it limps towards its grand twist reveal, but once it arrives, it doesn’t even commit enough for us to see why we’re supposed to care. We won’t spoil the twists and turns of Knox Goes Away, but the film’s reveal of why Knox and Miles were estranged in the first place doesn’t even feel half-baked — it feels like the raw cookie dough of a film twist, an idea that gets tossed off and given room to mutate and take on actual meaning and significance.
Knox Goes Away is the worst kind of bad movie: it’s one that isn’t really bad, but is disappointing enough that its existence makes you a little angry knowing that it was one or two steps away from greatness. A premise and cast like this should be a slam dunk, but even the best actors of the bunch are dragged down by the flatness of the script. There are a hundred different jokes to be made about the irony of a film about dementia being this painfully forgettable, but honestly, people forgetting about this movie would be a blessing. Maybe then, someone could take the idea and make something far sharper than this.
Photo courtesy of Saban Films
The post Knox Goes Away appeared first on Spectrum Culture.