How to Make a Killing is in cinemas from 11 March. Add it to your watchlist
There has never been a worse time to be a rich person in a film. In the last seven years alone, Parasite, The Menu, Ready or Not, Triangle of Sadness, Knives Out and Saltburn have all seen the proverbial 1% meet gruesome ends, as the “eat the rich” subgenre has united audiences against a common enemy.
With this in mind, How to Make a Killing, the new thriller starring Glen Powell, both joins these ranks with ease and fails to stand out from the crowd. It is adequately watchable and aims to be keenly modern, but is undercut by a failure to escape roots in a British film from 1949.
View Green Video on the source websiteWritten and directed by John Patton Ford (Emily the Criminal), the film opens with Becket Redfellow (Powell) having his last meal while in a cell on death row. As he enters his final few hours, he recounts to a priest provided by the penitentiary how he murdered his way to the top of his family tree to claim billions in inheritance. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is: this black-comedy thriller is a wholesale 21st-century remake of Kind Hearts and Coronets, the superlative Ealing comedy with Dennis Price and Alec Guinness.
“Money doesn’t buy you happiness? That’s dead wrong,” Becket says in voiceover. He is the son of Mary Redfellow, a New York aristocrat who was exiled by her father (Ed Harris) after refusing to have an abortion when she became pregnant with Becket as a teen. Upon growing up and learning that he is eighth in line to the $28 billion family fortune, he pledges to “prune a few branches from the family tree” — a line lifted somewhat shamelessly from Kind Hearts and Coronets.
What follows is a light-on-its-feet 105 minutes that revels in the double entendre of its title, as the audience are privy to the planning and execution of Becket’s schemes. Having “the right kind of life” is what drives him, as a number of cousins and uncles of all archetypes are dispatched in comedic ways involving yachts, a bow and arrow, photography dark rooms and teeth-whitening kits.
The first is played by Rafferty Law, whose nepo-baby credentials as the son of Jude Law — and particularly The Talented Mr Ripley’s Dickie Greenleaf — make him a canny bit of casting for an entitled brat. But it’s the character actors of Bill Camp and Zach Woods, as Uncle Warren and Cousin Noah respectively, who provide the film’s most robust comedy and enjoyable passages.
“I got this bottle of whiskey from Dick Cheney,” Camp’s banker brags as he foolishly takes Becket under his wing. Patton Ford’s script has the odd pleasing quip but rarely probes further to showcase the keen sense of class boasted by his previous film, Emily the Criminal. In a conflict never truly addressed by the script, Becket makes a mockery of wealth by birthright… but also asks us to believe in it.
As his kill count rises, Becket’s life is expanded by a girlfriend he earnestly falls for (a charming Jessica Henwick) and a fairly bland femme fatale from his past life (Margaret Qualley). Powell proves a charismatic presence throughout, but is more Bruce Wayne than Patrick Bateman, leaning closer to the waspish Ivy-League side of his character than the sociopath. Given the entertainment when he let his hair down as the many alter egos of an assassin in Hit Man — a performance that coincidentally echoed Alec Guinness’s eight family members in Kind Hearts — this is something of a shame.
By the time Ed Harris’s gravel-voiced patriarch arrives and a shootout ensues, steam is running out — and Becket reminds us that “this is a tragedy”, although the film can’t land on any genre with confidence. In the end, the rehashing of Kind Hearts and Coronets lends a cruel irony amid the subject matter: How to Make a Killing feels less like an heir apparent for our times and more like a distant relative struggling to forge their own path.
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