'Knox Goes Away' Review: A Forgettable Neo-Noir Thriller

Michael Keaton’s Knox Goes Away begins with hired killer John “Aristotle” Knox (Keaton) in his car, cruising through the night to the sound of a mournful saxophone. It seems like we’re gearing up for one of those long, dark nights of the soul that neo-noir thrillers thrive on, but the film proves unwilling to really drive forward into the darkness. In the end, it’s a tale of male alienation that’s a little too afraid of alienating its audience.

Knox lives alone, only interacting with other members of his morbid industry and Annie (Joanna Kulig), the Polish sex worker who comes to visit him once a week. He carries out each of his jobs with cold precision, before then stashing the money he earns with the utmost care. It’s the perfect role for Keaton, given his unique intermingling of intensity and offbeat charm, and he benefits from the script giving him the lion’s share of the punchiest lines. When Knox’s partner (Ray McKinnon) asks him why he isn’t interested in learning anything about the person they’re about to kill, he simply replies, “Because in 10 minutes he’s not gonna be anybody.”

Knox’s almost ascetic approach to life—the kind shared by the heroes of many an existential crime film—is what makes him so good at his job, until his orderly existence is thrown into disarray by a pair of devastating blows that arrive in quick succession. The first comes from a visit to the neurologist where Knox learns that he has Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare and rapidly progressing form of dementia. And just as he’s working out how to spend his last remaining weeks of mental clarity, his son, Miles (James Marsden), shows up at his door, panic-stricken and covered in blood, with a problem that only Knox and his set of skills can solve.

Thus, the film becomes a race against the clock as Knox puts together an elaborate plan to save his son, scrawling each stage of it down in a notebook to help him work around the ever-widening gaps in his memory. At the same time, a detective named Emily Ikari (Suzy Nakamura) is hot on his heels and threatens to catch up with him even before the disease does.

While it never threatens to achieve the visual cool that Michale Mann or Jean-Pierre Melville’s poetic crime tales coast on, Knox Goes Away is an efficiently directed thriller. Slick pacing makes the film feel much leaner than its 114-minute runtime, and there’s a compelling, Breaking Bad-esque quality to the methodical way in which Knox carries out his plan. The scheme he comes up with to save his son also turns out to be genuinely clever.

The dementia aspect of the plot, however, remains more of a gimmick, an excuse for the film to obscure certain facts from the audience and to bombard the screen with noise and motion in an attempt to convey Knox’s growing confusion. Throughout, we’re told a lot of interesting things about Knox—he’s an avid reader, a former soldier, and the holder of not one but two PhDs—but we never get much insight into who he is or why he gave up his comfortable civilian life to become a contract killer. It’s ultimately hard to really connect to the tragedy of watching a person lose themselves when we have no real sense of who they were in the first place.

The film is a little too concerned with keeping Knox likeable. His ex-wife, Ruby (Marcia Gay Harden), still looks at him lovingly, and his estranged son admits that he was a pretty good dad back in the day. His mind might be failing him, but Knox’s soul appears oddly un-tortured by his years of murder-for-hire, and the film doesn’t seem to feel any particular sort of way about it either. Instead, Knox Goes Away motors steadily toward redemption and family reconciliation, leaving all opportunity for real moral reckoning in its rearview mirror.