<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=2RkFSj_0wBBBEA200" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=2RkFSj_0wBBBEA200" width="1200" height="675" ><figcaption>Image via Saban Films</figcaption></figure>He was Ken before Ryan Gosling made it cool, he made Betelgeuse cool on two separate occasions, he wowed as cinema’s most beloved Batman, he was patient zero as Spider-Man’s first solo MCU villain, and he quite poetically got nominated for the Oscar for playing a guy who once portrayed a superhero based on a winged animal.All this, and the Michael Keaton train continues to plow forward. His next appearance will be in the film Goodrich, in which he plays an art dealer who seeks out his daughter from his previous marriage (Mila Kunis) to help him raise the nine-year-old children of his new family, but for now, Keaton’s making a splash on streaming both in front of and behind the camera.Per FlixPatrol, this day of Oct. 17 has seen Knox Goes Away, Keaton’s second directorial effort after 2008’s The Merry Gentleman, run straight to the top of Prime Video‘s Top 10 film charts in Canada. Starring Keaton as dementia-ridden contract killer John Knox, the film follows John’s efforts to get his affairs in order and right whatever wrongs he can before his illness renders him unable to do so, and his latest job going south is no big help there. Also among the cast is James Marsden (X-Men, X2, X-Men: The Last Stand) as Knox’s estranged son Miles, and Al Pacino (The Devil’s Advocate) as Knox’s confidant Xavier Crane.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=3RPHsV_0wBBBEA200" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=3RPHsV_0wBBBEA200" width="1200" height="675" ><figcaption>Image via Sabal Films</figcaption></figure>It is at once a film where you come for Keaton and quite begrudgingly stay for Keaton, because Knox Goes Away has little to offer in the realm of watchability, and that’s including the so-bad-it’s-good streaming schlock whose market value is rooted in how much you can sneer at it and scroll on your phone without missing anything. Indeed, Knox Goes Away is actually cinematically competent, which makes its dramatic failures all the more depressing.There’s flashes of inspiration in the DNA of the script. A story about redemption and how to ensure the best possible outcome in a morally complex world is no laughable effort, and there’s mileage to be had in an assassin protagonist who can only account for a handful of hours at a time. Unfortunately, Knox Goes Away doesn’t lean into either of those things nearly enough over the course of its proceedings, instead opting for a surplus of procedural scenes that, assuming they set up any tension or emotional payoff at all, meander pretty tediously towards decidedly flat narrative beats.For this approach to have worked, we needed to spend more time with the characters who had real emotional stakes here (i.e. Knox and his family), and less time with those who didn’t. We didn’t need any of the scenes with the police; the tension doesn’t lie in how close or how far they are from catching Knox, but whether Knox is going to be able to beat the dementia clock, straighten everything out with his family, and be cognitively present for the emotional payoff of that success. The police scenes distract from that; Knox working his way through his old haunts does not.Moreover, rather than have his dementia be visually represented as a technical expression of what Knox sees, why not also use it to keep information away from us and deepen the mystery in a meaningful way? At the very least, Knox Goes Away needed to take advantage of an assassin who was only working with so much memory and information at any specific time (memory and information that, importantly, jumps in and out of his head), and that simply didn’t happen.But hey, it beats having Killer Heat — Prime Video’s wet sock of a crime thriller starring Richard Madden (Marvel Studios’ Eternals) as a pair of twins, one of which gets murdered — stuck at the top of the charts. Even without the cowl, Keaton is the hero that we need, but don’t deserve.</div></body>

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He was Ken before Ryan Gosling made it cool, he made Betelgeuse cool on two separate occasions, he wowed as cinema’s most beloved Batman, he was patient zero as Spider-Man’s first solo MCU villain, and he quite poetically got nominated for the Oscar for playing a guy who once portrayed a superhero based on a winged animal.