Anyone who has read this blog with any consistency will know my opinion of hit man (or woman) movies: There’s way too many considering the profession itself is essentially a fantasy. And because of the sheer volume of films represented by the genre, eventually filmmakers resort to narrative quirks to distinguish their product from everything that came before it. Michael Keaton’s aging assassin Knox has a unique background. He’s a double PhD who served not only in the military during the Gulf War but also a prison sentence for some kind of financial misadventure. But that impressive C.V. isn’t the quirk that sets Knox Goes Away from other hit man flicks. Right at the beginning, our hero is diagnosed with a form of dementia that will have him completely out-of-it in a matter of weeks, meaning he has to get his shit in order, which includes making amends with his estranged son Miles (James Marsden). Right on cue, Miles shows up at Knox’s door, all bloody and panicked, pleading for help because he just killed a man for raping his teenage daughter. It’s not only an assignment that’s right up Knox’s alley (he seems to only take jobs where the victim deserves it, though he professes not to care), but one that provides the requisite “work against time” premise, since his short-term memory is fading fast. 

Regardless of the emotional contours, which are quite curvy in this movie, the crux of the story is the process and how it plays out. Knox has to cover up his son’s act, and the script by Gregory Poirier attractively streamlines the setup by pitching it against the subplot of a police detective (Suzy Namamura) investigating a recent hit where Knox’s partner (Ray McKinnon) was left dead due to a brain-added mistake on Knox’s part. Various distractions, which also include Knox reconnecting with his ex-wife (Marcia Gay Harden) and having occasional trysts with a young Eastern European hooker (Joanna Kulig), are smoothly integrated with his struggle to keep his mind ordered enough to save his son, accomplishments that are greatly aided by his mentor, who is played by Al Pacino with all the gravelly voiced aplomb he can muster; but in the end Poirier and Keaton, who also directs, require the audience to suspend a hefty amount of disbelief just in order to get them to the twisty conclusion.

The main appeal of Knox Goes Away is its utility as a vehicle for Keaton’s peculiar charms. Though Knox’s back story is overly convoluted, it seems specifically tooled to take advantage of Keaton’s native intelligence and readiness with a cutting quip. Only someone with advanced degrees in history and English could provide the kind of highfalutin banter that comes out of Knox’s mouth as a matter of course, regardless of his encroaching senility, but the main question remains: How did a guy like that end up as a professional hit man? 

As cynical as Knox can be, he can’t hold a candle in that department to Steve Coogan’s Tom Michell, a peripatetic English teacher making his way south through the Americas in the late 1970s in a bid to escape a tragedy in his past. Michell is a real person who wrote a memoir about his adventures some 20 years ago, and The Penguin Lessons, directed by Peter Cattaneo, is supposed be based on it, though the dramatic elements feel tacked on. Very little that goes on in the movie is believable. 

When it opens, Michell has arrived in Buenos Aires to teach at a private boys’ school just as the 1976 coup is taking place that will install a fascist government. With this turmoil in the background, Michell contends not only with a classroom full of privileged layabouts, but a head master (Jonathan Pryce) who prefers to remain oblivious to what’s going on in the wider world, even as it adversely affects his staff and students. Michell’s disaffection just grows worse, and during a weekend jaunt to Ecuador, where his aim is to get laid, a potential bedmate foists a stranded male penguin on him that he just can’t shake, forcing him to smuggle the bird back to Argentina with him. 

As Cattaneo has shown in movies like The Full Monty, he knows his way around a reliable comic cliche, and The Penguin Lessons run the gamut, from mixed linguistic signals to corrupt but inept figures of authority. Eventually, the penguin comes to represent Michell’s throwing off his past and assuming in its place an actual conscience in the face of authoritarian terror, developments that feel so forced you are sometimes compelled to avert your eyes in fear that your intelligence will be overridden by the rank but effective sentimentality that Cattaneo wields at every meaningful plot juncture. As with Keaton, Coogan’s reliable screen image as a silver-tongued scamp goes far to make the movie endurable if not necessarily watchable. The penguin, though cute, is still just a bird. 

Knox Goes Away opens Dec. 5 in Tokyo at Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978). 

The Penguin Lessons, in English and Spanish, opens Dec. 5 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001).

Knox Goes Away home page in Japanese

The Penguin Lessons home page in Japanese

Knox Goes Away photo (c) 2023 Hidden Hill LLC

The Penguin Lessons photo (c) 2024 Nostromo Production Studios S.L.; Nostromo Pictures Canarias S.L.; Penguin Lessons, Ltd.