'Knox Goes Away' review: Too placid dementia thriller

Michael Keaton doesn't have to prove anything as a movie star, accomplished actor and person who makes people laugh. His ready-made Batman look at last weekend's Oscars was meme-worthy, easily upstaging co-hosts Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito a bit. In front of a camera, Keaton has always been easy to follow in any realistic or high-concept setting that needs his authentic, consistent charisma.

However, there is something about playing tired hitmen that appeals to him as a director. A decade and a half after Keaton made his debut behind the camera with “The Merry Gentleman,” in which he also played a hitman who is given the chance to redeem himself through friendship with an unsuspecting woman. , has chosen to direct himself again in a similar film. Tenuous story that shows a violent man who is shown a way out. In the low-key, woefully low-energy character study “Knox Goes Away,” veteran gun-for-hire John Knox (Keaton) faces the specter of a deadly neurological disease. In the meantime, he'll take care of some unfinished emotional business.

Increasing memory loss is, of course, no advantage when one is trained in precision, cruelty, and escape without a trace. So when Knox ruins what should have been a simple task, leaving three bodies instead of one, she decides to fix his affairs before dementia catches up with him like it has so many others. We hear that his victims are of the “deserving” type: traffickers, traffickers and the like. Movies love their honest hitmen, who are much easier to like than mercenaries. Our antihero is not only a former Marine, but a former academic who still reads philosophy and classical literature. He learnt and Lethal, what do you know?

Complicating Knox's departure from a lonely and dangerous vocation, however, is a nighttime visit from his bloodied and desperate son Miles (James Marsden), who has just killed someone in a fit of righteous revenge. Knox must now add saving Miles from the law to his list of outing errands, requiring an elaborate plan made more difficult by his rapidly worsening condition and a tenacious detective (Suzy Nakamura) hot on the trail of that hit. failed right to your door.

With its damned man plot (to the “DOA”), weekly afternoon encounters with a tough Polish escort (Cold War star Joanna Kulig), and the occasional mournful trumpet bleat on the soundtrack, “Knox Goes Away” should be a terribly enjoyable nonsense. But instead, screenwriter Gregory Poirier's tribute to the taciturn machismo of an earlier era is more confusing and ridiculous than fast and intelligent.

The material also seems to have bottled up Keaton's creative juices rather than loosening them. While conveying how a certain type of cautious loner might greet the inevitable, Keaton employs a straightforward narrative approach as a filmmaker, one that never goes beyond the pace and tone of a slightly moody TV procedural. Shot superficially by cinematographer Marshall Adams, “Knox Goes Away” may take place in the film noir capital of Los Angeles, but it could also be Anywheresville.

Even harder to reconcile is how little is done with an enviable cast, one in which Marcia Gay Harden as Knox's ex-wife and Al Pacino as a retired thief and a trusted friend named Xavier are, curiously, the most muted colors. . Pacino in particular seems confused as to why he fails to simply unsettle us with his usual bursts of energy. Even the unpredictable tension caused by reading an envelope at the Oscars was more compelling than anything else in “Knox Goes Away.”