Glen Powell’s mega-watt charisma made Hit Man a romantic-crime-comedy hit and Twisters more fun than an unimaginative redux had any right to be. But it couldn’t enliven last year’s creaky Chad Powers or leaden The Running Man.
His magnetism once again shines brightly in How to Make a Killing, although it’s served only partially well by this cautionary tale of money, murder, and one man’s efforts to homicidally seize his family’s fortune.
In Powell and Margaret Qualley, writer/director John Patton Ford (following up 2022’s Emily the Criminal) has two headliners with charm to burn. Yet ultimately, he doesn’t fully maximize their talents.
How to Make a Killing (Feb. 20, in theaters) is a loose remake of 1949’s Kind Hearts and Coronets, but it doesn’t equal that illustrious predecessor, which boasted, in Alec Guinness’ nine-role performance, a tour de force for the ages.
Nonetheless, Powell reconfirms that he’s cut out for the leading man spotlight as Becket Redfellow, a disowned nobody whose greed is matched by his vengeful fury. He points both those motivators at his affluent clan, who disowned his mother because she wouldn’t abort her out-of-wedlock child, and never came to his rescue after his father and mother fell fatally ill.
Becket’s sole solace as a kid (Grady Wilson) was his friendship with Julia Steinway (Maggie Toomey), an upper-cruster who fancied him despite his residing in lowly Belleville, New Jersey. Their romance fizzled before it could alight because, with his mom’s demise, Becket was shipped off to foster homes.
It’s not until he’s an adult working in a Manhattan haberdashery that he once again crosses paths with her, all grown up in the form of Qualley. The chemistry is still there, but not the timing, as Julia is engaged. To compound that letdown, he promptly loses his job, putting his prospects—already low, since he lives in his childhood home—in the proverbial sewer.
Ford’s film is narrated in hindsight by Becket, who’s relaying his ordeal (a “tragedy”) to a priest (Adrian Lukis) while he sits on death row, four hours from execution.
This implies that How to Make a Killing’s destination is doom, and the catalyst for that catastrophe is Julia’s request, at the end of their reunion, to “call me when you’ve killed them all.”
She’s referring to the Redfellows, a Long Island billionaire clan whose wealth Becket stands to inherit should he be the last relative standing. Though there are seven family members ahead of him in line, Becket takes Julia’s advice and makes his first target his obnoxious, flamboyantly dudebro-ish cousin Taylor (Raff Law).
From the moment she walks through the door of Becket’s place of employment, Qualley—decked out in one short-shirted outfit after another—comes across as the fatal-iest of femme fatales a hero could ever encounter, her eyes radiating cunning and desire and her every comment dripping with innuendo.
She’s an irresistible sexual danger in high heels and with perfectly coiffed Farah Fawcett hair, and Qualley has great fun exuding devilishness as she tempts and taunts Beckett, implying that she knows what he’s up to and trying (driven, ostensibly, by her loser husband’s failures) to parlay it into her own gain.
Qualley is so good at being bad that it’s a shame she’s not a bigger component of How to Make a Killing, whose attention is primarily trained on Becket, who discovers that murder isn’t as difficult to handle (and get away with) as he assumed.
Powell does a dexterous job straddling the line between uprightness and ruthlessness, using his big smile and aww-shucks demeanor as ruses to ingratiate himself into the corridors of power—most notably, with his uncle Warren (Bill Camp), who gives him a job at the family’s financial firm. Ford’s script, however, never makes his protagonist’s viciousness quite as sharp as it needs to be, undercutting the material’s mordant premise.
To some extent, this is because the filmmaker needs to keep Becket likable enough to sell his budding romance with sweet wannabe high school teacher Ruth (Jessica Henwick), who doesn’t care about the high life. Still, in spite of its headliner’s capable turn, How to Make a Killing is a bit dull around the edges, both in terms of its conception of Becket and its staging of his assassinations, some of which are handled with a cursoriness that softens their punch.
This is particularly true when it comes to his aunt Cassandra (Bianca Amato) and uncle McArthur (Sean Cameron Michael), whose participation in the proceedings is too fleeting to leave a mark, as well as Topher Grace’s shady pastor Steven, who vanishes almost as quickly as he’s introduced.
Silicon Valley alum Zach Woods fares somewhat better as Becket’s pretentious artist cousin Noah, whose callous arrogance is epitomized by his blasé confession that the only children he likes are from Eastern European countries because they’re traumatized and work really hard.
How to Make a Killing is snappy without overdoing it. Ford’s direction is brisk and stylish, and his plotting doesn’t dawdle on extraneous matters. As with his prior work, his storytelling is compact, and it leads, eventually, to a preordained showdown between Becket and his grandfather, patriarch Whitelaw (Ed Harris), an imperious titan ensconced in a vast, empty mansion.
How to Make a Killing has all the components necessary for a pitch-black blast, so it’s disappointing that it doesn’t wholly come together. The result, in the end, of plotting that fails to create requisite rollercoaster highs and lows, and a caustic worldview that falls short of totally convincing.
Repeatedly stating its themes, Ford’s film is about the push-pull between immorality and conscience, and the ability of some to drown out the latter in order to embrace the former. In Becket’s struggle to reconcile his warring impulses, it strives for bleak be-careful-what-you-wish-for irony, but its concluding pessimism resonates as more of a put-on than the real thing.
Fortunately, Powell and Qualley are such alluringly nasty delights that How to Make a Killing survives its potentially lethal missteps and, for the most part, works on its own limited terms. It might not deliver hilariously fatal blows, but it’s smart and spikey enough to leave a pleasurably painful mark.
