In How to Make a Killing, Glen Powell plays Becket Redfellow, a New Yorker bent on murdering his way to a multibillion-dollar inheritance.Ilze Kitshoff/Supplied
How to Make a Killing
Directed by John Patton Ford
Written by John Patton Ford, based on the novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal by Roy Horniman
Starring Glen Powell, Margaret Qualley and Ed Harris
Classification PG; 105 minutes
Opens in theatres Feb. 20
If you have been holding onto your Glen Powell stock, hoping to sell high, then you might want to reconsider your celebrity investment strategy.
While the actor can still be rakishly charming, and – as evidenced by his writing work with Richard Linklater – far more than the next big pretty face, Powell has displayed some disastrous decision-making when it comes to picking his projects. After the wet mess of Edgar Wright’s The Running Man and the hokey sitcom antics of his Hulu series Chad Powers, the man not too long ago hailed as the second coming of Tom Cruise continues his downward slide this weekend with the frequently flat and often confounding black comedy How to Make a Killing.
Powell previously starred in The Running Man, Twisters, Anyone But You and Hit Man.Ilze Kitshoff/Supplied
Very loosely adapted from the 1949 British comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets – itself based on the early 20th-century novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal – the new film arrives with a promising pedigree. Writer-director John Patton Ford previously delivered the tenacious little 2022 thriller Emily the Criminal, which soared thanks to an electric lead performance from Aubrey Plaza, and the filmmaker has assembled a crack team of supporting players for his follow-up, including Margaret Qualley, Zach Woods, Bill Camp, Topher Grace, Jessica Henwick and Ed Harris.
But if that cast sounds suspiciously close to an alt-universe Knives Out sequel, you’re unfortunately not far off: How to Make a Killing is a Rian Johnson-lite concoction that is neither all that funny nor moderately twisty, the entire affair landing too close to its title and feeling, simply, DOA.
Less a whodunnit than a whydunnit – as in, why should we care about any of these characters and their horrid actions? – the film follows the travails of Becket Redfellow (Powell), a blue-collar New Yorker whose mother was disowned by her fabulously wealthy family upon his birth. Harbouring a grudge and with seemingly no moral compunctions about knocking off his relatives, Becket goes about systematically murdering the many elder aunts, uncles and cousins who stand in the way of his multibillion-dollar inheritance.
Margaret Qualley in How to Make a Killing.Ilze Kitshoff/Supplied
In different hands, such a sordid tale might have been the perfect material for unleashing some incendiary class-warfare satire, generational-wealth capitalism viewed through the wild filter of a blood-soaked revenge epic. Yet Ford is no stylist – every frame seems drained of colour, every execution staged in the most pedestrian of fashions – and his character work is even weaker. We care no more about Becket than we do his many victims. And this is despite the considerable efforts of nearly every performer, including the always reliable Camp (Presumed Innocent, The Night Of) as Becket’s kind uncle, and Woods (The Office) as one of his more loathsome relatives.
Still, there are some prime offenders who aid and abet Ford’s cinematic misdemeanours. While Harris, as the cruel patriarch of the Redfellows, is not so much phoning his role in as he is sending it by carrier pigeon, it is Qualley and Powell who do the most unintentional damage.
While the former isn’t given all that much to work with as a smoky femme fatale, the actress could still exercise a far tighter grip on the role. And Powell, well, he is barely trying, the typically charming glint in his eyes not so much trained on pumping up this film’s script as it is the next, surely more promising opportunity lurking around the corner. May he truly kill it the next time.