“How to Make a Killing,” starring Glen Powell as a working-class man who sets out to murderously reclaim his inheritance, has a clear inspiration: the great Ealing black comedy “Kind Hearts and Coronets.”
In that sublimely wicked 1949 film, Alec Guinness played all eight of the relatives that Dennis Price’s would-be heir tries to bump off, making the film among the most delightful showcases of Sir Alec’s range. Powell, as it happens, has already played a shape-shifter in an assassination comedy, Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man.”
But the deft tonal balance of “Hit Man,” let alone of “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” is missing in “How to Make a Killing,” a disappointingly flat almost-remake that has neither the biting farce nor the chilling darkness to match its black comedy ambitions.
In the film, written and directed by John Patton Ford, Powell doesn’t opt for Guinness’ chameleonic path. He plays a version of the Price character: Becket Redfellow, an outcast from an uber-wealthy family. After becoming pregnant at 18, Becket’s mother is exiled by her father, Whitelaw Redfellow (Ed Harris). The most compelling thing about “How to Make a Killing” may be that, after an early flashback with Whitelaw, we know Becket will eventually face off with the Redfellow patriarch. There are worse ways to keep an audience around than to tacitly promise more Ed Harris.
Becket is, himself, the narrator of his tale. He’s telling it to a priest from a jail cell, four hours before his execution. But Becket is not remorseful for his misdeeds nor particularly anxious about his impending sentence. Disappointed by his last-meal cheesecake, he smirks, “Kill me now.”
If “How to Make a Killing” carried this tone — Powell’s signature glibness, with an edge — the movie might have worked better. Instead, Becket is a curiously uninteresting protagonist whose descent into serial killing happens wanly.
After losing his job as a clerk to make way for the shop owner’s son, Becket resolves to track down the cousins that stand to inherit the vast family fortune. He’s motivated by advice from his mother — not to rest until he’s got “the right kind of life” — and by a chance encounter with his childhood crush (Margaret Qualley) who jocularly tells him to call her when he’s killed three or four.
The subsequent encounters give a window into the ultra-rich. Topher Grace plays a cousin, Bill Camp an uncle and Raff Law, son of Jude, another cousin. “How to Make a Killing” has a handful of Hollywood nepo babies (Qualley is the daughter of Andie MacDowell), but going further might have added a meta twist.
The lone standout of a forgettable bunch is Noah Redfellow (played by the perpetually underused Zach Woods), a painter who touts himself as “White Basquiat.” But the cast member that most gives “How to Make a Killing” a lift is Jessica Henwick, who stood out even in a peripheral role in “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.” She plays Becket’s down-to-earth girlfriend, whose warm presence increasingly makes you doubt Becket’s already faint motivation for murder.
Ford previously wrote and directed the excellent 2022 thriller “Emily the Criminal,” with Aubrey Plaza. That film, about a debt-ridden Los Angeles gig worker drawn into a criminal underbelly, showed Ford has the ability to connect contemporary class themes with gritty genre narratives. The more polished “How to Make a Killing,” though, never connects those dots.
It also doesn’t help that the last few months have already given us a sensational satire about killing to get ahead: Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice,” starring Lee Byung-hun as a newly unemployed family man who aims to eliminate his competition for a new job. Unfortunately for “How to Make a Killing,” it would have to bump off quite a few movies to move up the black-comedy ranks.
“How to Make a Killing,” an A24 release, opens in theaters Friday. It’s rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language and some violence/bloody images. Running time: 105 minutes. Two stars out of four.
