Knox Goes to the Snack Shack

Quickie reviews of Michael Keaton's new hitman film, 'Knox Goes Away,' and 'Snack Shack,' a recent coming-of-age comedy.

It’s time for quick reviews of two recent films that have absolutely nothing to do with one another other than that they were released on the same day! Yaaaaayyyyy!!!

Knox Goes Away

Michael Keaton has directed two feature films: 2008’s The Merry Gentleman, in which he stars as a suicidally depressed hitman, and now Knox Goes Away, in which he stars as a hitman suffering from a rare neurodegenerative disorder. Why does Keaton so enjoy telling stories about assassins at the end of their rope? Well, I imagine it’s at least in part because he’s pretty damn good at it: Knox Goes Away, like The Merry Gentleman, is a solid dramatic thriller for grown-ups, one of those films people call “The kind of movie they don’t make anymore” (to wit: Lionsgate buried Knox Goes Away’s brief theatrical release).

Early in Knox Goes Away, Keaton’s character, John Knox, is diagnosed with Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, which, as presented here at least, is an accelerated form of dementia. Faster than you can say “Get your affairs in order,” Knox receives a surprise visit from his long-estranged son, Miles (James Marsden), who has a serious issue of his own: he has murdered a neo-Nazi who also seduced and impregnated Knox’s 16-year-old granddaughter, and he needs Knox’s expertise to make sure he gets away with the crime. Knox thus finds himself in a race against his illness to carry out a complex plan that will save Miles before it’s too late.

The subject matter of Knox Goes Away may be grim, but Keaton, working from a script by Gregory Poirier (National Treasure: Book of Secrets), manages to insert gallows humor where he can. And because Keaton is Keaton, we like Knox, even though he’s a murderer, and we’re rooting for him to pull off his mission. The supporting cast, which also includes Suzy Nakamura (The West Wing) as the cop on Knox’s trail, Joanna Kulig (Cold War) as a sex worker who sees Knox on the regular, Marcia Gay Harden as Miles’ mother, and some guy named Al Pacino as Knox’s mentor, is also uniformly excellent.

There aren’t a ton of surprises in Knox Goes Away, and some of it, including a subplot about Nakamura’s character having conflict with her less-astute partner (John Hoogenakker), is a little on the nose. But as I said before: it’s a totally solid movie for grown-ups! What I wouldn’t give for 10 or 12 of these a year, y’know?

Snack Shack

Is there anything more heartbreaking than a movie that starts off being great before going completely off the rails? Such is the case with Snack Shack, the new coming-of-age film from writer/director Adam Carter Rehmeier (Dinner in America).

Set in Nebraska in the summer of 1991, Snack Shack is about a pair of 14-year-old friends, A.J. (Conor Sherry) and Moose (Gabriel LaBelle). They are, to put it mildly, schemers: we first meet them smoking cigarettes and placing bets in an OTB, to which they have escaped while on a school trip. They also make money by playing poker, brewing their own beer, selling old golf balls and chocolate bars that are past their expiration date, spray-painting people’s addresses onto the curb in front of their houses, and, eventually, by renting and operating the titular establishment at the local public pool (they figure out little kids will pay them an extra 75 cents if they write obscenities on their hot dogs with ketchup or mustard). Their personal Yoda is Shane (Nick Robinson), just back from Desert Storm and now working as a lifeguard before starting college; the new girl in town that they both have the hots for is Brooke (Mika Abdalla), a military brat and amateur photographer who also ends up with a lifeguard gig for the season.

For its first 40 minutes or so, Snack Shack is so goddamn funny it seems destined to be the new Superbad. It exists in a John Hughes-esque reality (relatable, but also a little heightened), and is bursting at the seams with energy (an early scene deliberately references the most coked-out section of Goodfellas). The cast - including David Costabile and Gillian Vigman as A.J.’s uptight parents - is incredible; I was sitting there thinking, “Who is this Labelle kid? He’s gonna be a star!”, and then I looked him up afterward and realized I’d seen him in something else: he played a young, sensitive Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans. Here, LaBelle is loud, cocky, and slick, like a more confident version of Anthony Michael Hall’s character from Sixteen Candles. Talk about a 180!

And then, poof!, that incredible comedy goes away, replaced by a melodrama that doesn’t earn its self-seriousness.

The first problem is the love triangle that develops between A.J., Moose, and Brooke. Rehmeier plays these parts of the movie like it’s goddamn Othello, and absolutely nothing about it warrants such self-seriousness. It’s teenagers navigating young love! Those types of stories are almost always best served by being comedies because no matter how painful they seem at the time, the audience knows that these are just kids, and they’ll get over all this shit. Not helping: Brooke, despite Abdalla’s obvious charisma, is little more than a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She has very little character or interior life of her own; her response to being a subject of strife between two friends doesn’t feel authentic. Just as bad is that every conflict in which she’s involved in so easily solved as to render it borderline irrelevant.

The movie’s other big problem, however…

SPOILERS!

…is Shane. Disregard the oddity of a young 20-something spending so much time with a couple of 14-year-olds; his fate is both bleak and exploitative. He’s so clearly going to die that Rehmeier may as well have had the Grim Reaper lurking behind him in every shot. Still, I thought his death would be dramatically well-integrated into the narrative. But no. His death only serves as a deus ex machina to bring A.J. and Moose back together after their mutual desire for Brooke has torn them apart. It reduces their rivalry to nothing; one of them says “Are we good, dude?” and the one says “Of course,” and that’s it, the conflict is over. I guess the point is that arguing over a girl seems trivial in the face of death, which is true, but, again… this movie can’t bear the weight of such existential issues.

The best movies in this genre - the aforementioned Superbad, Booksmart, Adventureland, and Lady Bird being contemporary examples - earn their emotion and profundity partially by the stakes small. The fallout between friends and romantic partners happens late in the game, is resolved through character growth, and is never treated like a Bergman movie.

But that first half, tho…!