KNOX GOES AWAY is, somehow, the second movie I watched in a week where a professional killer is diagnosed with the fatal neurocognitive disorder Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In THE KILLER’S GAME it quickly turns out to be a false alarm, but even setting that one aside there’s a small subgenre of killers trying to do one last job before their dementia stops them. I’ve also seen THE DYING OF THE LIGHT with Nicolas Cage and MEMORY with Liam Neeson, which is a remake of a Belgian film called THE ALZHEIMER CASE (or at least an adaptation of the same novel). I suppose all of these are a cousin to movies about killers with other fatal diseases – in 3 DAYS TO KILL, for example, Kevin Costner has an aggressive form of cancer, in SHADOWBOXER Helen Mirren has the cancer, in KATE Mary Elizabeth Winstead has been poisoned, etc.
This one has a little dark humor but it’s mostly grim and serious. Michael Keaton (AMERICAN ASSASSIN) directs and stars as John Knox, who has hidden his memory problems from people including his partner Muncie (Ray McKinnon, FOOTLOOSE). When a specialist (Paul Perri, MANHUNTER) tells him the news he starts saying he’s “going away” and “cashing out,” as he arranges to launder his assets and give them to his ex-wife Ruby (Marcia Gay Harden, SPACE COWBOYS), estranged son Miles (James Marsden, ACCIDENTAL LOVE) and favorite sex worker Annie (Joanna Kulig, COLD WAR).
There are two big complications, though: one, he gets confused during his last job, kills more people than expected and does a bad job of making it look like they killed each other. Two, Miles comes to him panicked because in a rage he killed a guy for statutorily raping his daughter. So Knox agrees to use his unique knowledge (and last days of lucidity) to cover up the crime. But Detective Emily Ikari (Suzy Nakamura, “Jenny’s Assistant,” DEEP IMPACT) is investigating the first mess, which will eventually lead her to the second one.
To me this one plays like an adaptation of a novel, but it’s actually a spec script by Gregory Poirier (DANGER ZONE III: STEEL HORSE WAR, DANGER ZONE 4: MAD GIRLS BAD GIRLS) that Keaton was attached to so long that he eventually came around to directing it. He’s one of those actors who’s always fascinating to watch, which is important for a movie like this where we watch his process without knowing at first what he’s up to. He’s moving around the murder weapon and bloody clothes, breaking into a security office and messing with the recordings from the night of the murder, fending off questions from cops, and meanwhile working with his old friend Xavier (Al Pacino, THE SON OF NO ONE) and others trying to exchange diamonds and paintings for money. But the whole time we know he’s losing it so we’re not sure he’s doing it right, and it seems like he doesn’t either.
Most people reading this probly know my dad had Alzheimer’s, making me sensitive to these kind of stories. I know I’m getting hardened to it because this was a pretty authentic depiction but I only got teary a little at the very end. I don’t have to worry about covering up crimes, but the sort of confusion Knox is dealing with is my greatest fear, really, and the way he gets confused about things and tries to hid it from people was very familiar from the early days of my dad’s disease. And what the doctor tells him about having strong emotions but not remembering the thoughts that caused them, I definitely saw my dad going through that, and it’s really upsetting.
There’s a scene where Knox goes to his old house and I think it was genuinely to talk to Ruby, but he seems to forget that, starts to act like he still lives there. He opens up the freezer looking for something, writes “beer” on the white board grocery list.
Ruby of course mistakes him for an intruder at first and almost shoots him. It’s a bittersweet encounter where she expresses love for him and clearly notices he’s acting strange, but maybe doesn’t catch the significance of him struggling to remember his granddaughter’s name (he didn’t know her anyway) and calling college “the big school.”
It’s an effective form of suspense, too. We get invested in him pulling this stuff off but he can always go into a place and forget why he’s there. He’s a hyper-competent mastermind but also extremely vulnerable. I was so worried about him.
It’s fair to say some of it is a little clunky. I don’t think it was necessary to make the pedophile also a neo-nazi, and some of Ikari’s hard boiled dialogue felt a little self conscious to me. But for the most part it’s a very classy, understated crime movie with a great performance from Keaton and an interesting dynamic between him and his son as they sort of warm to each other under these dark circumstances.
September 28th, 2024 at 6:34 pm
Good review. I heard very mixed things about this but Michael Keaton is always worth watching. And his first directorial effort, “The Merry Gentleman”, is also a hitman movie, and also a Christmas movie! I remember that being a pretty low-key enjoyable movie about real-ish people, and this always sounded of the same ilk.