Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Knox Goes Away’ on Max and Hulu, An Excellent Noir Directed By and Starring Michael Keaton

Michael Keaton directs himself in Knox Goes Away (now streaming on Max), about a hitman whose memories are slipping away due to a degenerative brain disease. It’s Keaton’s second stint behind the camera (he also played a hitman in the first, 2008’s The Merry Gentleman; read into that as you may), and enjoys a strong supporting cast that includes James Marsden, Al Pacino and Marcia Gay Harden. The film proves him wholly capable of telling a noir-tinged story with a little artistry and poignancy, and it’s anything but forgettable.  

KNOX GOES AWAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “That’s OK, doc. Even if I hated you for telling me, I’d forget soon enough.” That’s Knox (Keaton) talking. He’s just been diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rapidly progressive form of dementia. He has a few more weeks of lucidity. That means it’s time for him to get his affairs in order, after he finishes one last gig. He and his partner Muncie (Ray McKinnon) bust into a scumbag’s apartment, and Knox puts one in the target and one in his girlfriend and one in Muncie. That last one wasn’t supposed to happen. He got confused. He’s lasted this long without getting caught – he’s a wily and shrewd contract killer with PhDs and a past behind-enemy-lines military-recon gig – so it’s got to be his brain rebelling against him. He arranges the bodies and gun the best he can and gets out. It’s not at all foolproof, but it might buy him some time.

Things always come in threes, right, so we’ve got his diagnosis and his f—up and then there’s a knock at his door. His long-estranged son Miles (James Marsden) is hyperventilating and covered with blood. “I killed someone,” Miles gasps. “Did they deserve killing?”, Knox retorts. That’s debatable: The guy was a 32-year-old creep who impregnated the 16-year-old granddaughter Knox has never met. Lucky for Miles, his father is an expert at dealing with this type of situation. He tells Miles to play it cool, then drops in on the crime scene and gets to work.

Thirty-seven minutes into the movie, we see Al Pacino. He plays Xavier, Knox’s employer and closest confidant. Knox wrote down a plan to fix Miles’ situation and shares it and the diagnosis with Xavier, who’ll help him out. Check in on him. Make sure Knox disables the passcode on his phone so he doesn’t forget it and then can’t use it. See if each step in Knox’s plan is going according to spec. Meanwhile, Detective Ikari (Suzy Nakamura) sniffs around Knox’s oopsie murder scene and sniffs around Miles’ murder scene, because Los Angeles is a very small town and there’s only one homicide detective on the force. There’s a subplot involving Annie (Joanna Kulig), Knox’s every-Thursday callgirl date; he also drops in on his ex (Marcia Gay Harden) to let her know that he’s “going away,” thus stirring all kinds of complex feelings. Now, I dunno if there’s any question as to whether Knox will successfully fix everything before his mind is gone – it seems inevitable. It might be the simple matter of how he does it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Memory (2022) boasted a very similar premise: Liam Neeson playing a hitman with Alzheimer’s.  

Performance Worth Watching: It pretty much goes without saying that Keaton is excellent in this – he’s an old pro still willing to tackle challenging roles like this deep into his career. 

Memorable Dialogue: Xavier comforts Knox after he shares news of his diagnosis: “Jesus Knox, I can’t think of anything worse – except maybe your pecker stops working.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I recently watched Sleeping Dogs, in which Russell Crowe plays a retired cop fighting through Alzheimer’s to solve an old case; that exploitative endeavor crassly used the disease as a plot device. Knox Goes Away handles memory loss in a more sensitive manner: Cruetzfeldt-Jakob is a harsh reality the character has to deal with, prompting some meaningful character exploration from Keaton. Sure, the disease is essentially a quietly ticking countdown to Knox’s total mental incapacitation, so it’s a device to amplify dramatic tension. But that’s secondary to Keaton’s efforts; he endows Knox with enough soul-searching, you’ll begin to wonder if the guy deserves a redemptive arc.

The tortured morality at the center of the film renders it prickly and fascinating. As decent, upright human beings, we want to hope for the best for Knox. But should we? Keaton underscores the drama with subtle bits of grim comedy, which nudges us away from feeling too bad about a career murderer-slash-sociopath who always justified his line of work by insisting everyone he killed was a bad person; he’s smart, but maybe not smart enough to recognize the irony of his own redemptive arc when he took away similar opportunities from many other people. But hey, at least he’s haunted by the two innocents he accidentally offed. 

That’s complicated by another irony, that the apple maybe doesn’t fall too far from the tree. Miles purposely distanced himself from Knox after learning about his father’s nasty profession; now Miles needs Knox’s expertise to extricate himself from a hairy situation – a hairy situation that stirs some plausibility issues, but never distracts from the entertainment value of the twisty plot. More to the point, did that statutory rapist (who, you might notice, is covered with White supremacist tattoos) deserve killing? Good lord, I can’t answer that. As decent, upright human beings, we should believe in rehabilitation – and now Miles might need a little bit of that himself, having taken the role of judge, jury and executioner in a fit of rage that can be justified, up to the point where he stabs the guy, of course. It’s this type of ethical murk and cynicism that defines Knox Goes Away as fascinatingly fraught noir. 

Our Call: STREAM IT. Keaton is 73 and still working hard. You can’t help but admire it.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.