How to Make a Killing
Glen Powell has never been less appealing than in this lacklustre, ramshackle and plodding black ‘comedy’.
How to Make a Turkey: Glen Powell
Image courtesy of StudioCanal.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Maybe How to Make a Killing thinks it’s clever. Take two of the most attractive, fastest rising stars in the Hollywood firmament and then hitch them to a remake of one of the most beloved films in the canon of British cinema: what could go wrong? Well, pretty much everything in this hideously misjudged, morose black comedy, if comedy is what it thinks it is. Following his turns in Top Gun: Maverick, Hit Man, Anyone But You and Twisters, Glen Powell looks like a star unable to make a false step, with a generous side helping of the smugs. The premise here, inspired by the Ealing classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, is how the disinherited scion of an $18 billion fortune sets about murdering all those family members that stand between him and his inheritance, leaving him as the sole heir. And so Becket Redfellow (Powell) is not just an arrogant and smarmy fellow, but a man weighed down with an unattractive trait of unwarranted entitlement.
The reason that Kinds Hearts and Coronets (1949) has weathered the vicissitudes of time is largely because of Robert Hamer and John Dighton’s scintillating and literate screenplay and because of the neat trick of casting Alec Guinness as all eight of the aristocratic victims, even the indomitable Lady Agatha. Here, the writer-director John Patton Ford, drawing from the same source novel by Roy Horniman, has cast different actors, some of whom are given so little screen time as to appear subliminal. The murders themselves, explained in advance via voice-over, vary in ingenuity, although Becket does seem to know his chemistry.
Not only is How To Make a Killing depressingly mechanical in its execution, but it is devoid of wit and charm, whose characters are given little opportunity to breathe or make any impression whatsoever. It’s unclear whether the film is meant to be a thriller or a black comedy or something else entirely: a satire about the unapologetic one percent? What it is, though, is a lifeless, largely underlit and glum parable that appears to occupy a parallel world of its own. As the former love of Becket’s life-turned-femme fatale, Margaret Qualley pops up at bewildering intervals with a mysterious agenda all her own, purely to keep us, and Becket, on our toes. Ms Qualley is a wonderful actress (cf. The Substance, Blue Moon, the Netflix drama Maid), but is given scant opportunity here other than to simper and baffle. Not wishing to give the final act away, but the conclusion to Becket’s sorry story is downright nonsensical. With such impressive production values, one might have thought that the filmmakers could have at least splashed out for a legal consultant.
Cast: Glen Powell, Margaret Qualley, Jessica Henwick, Bill Camp, Zach Woods, Topher Grace, Ed Harris, Raff Law, Nell Williams, Alexander Hanson, James Frecheville, Adrian Lukis, Grady Wilson, Maggie Toomey.
Dir John Patton Ford, Pro Graham Broadbent and Pete Czernin, Ex Pro Glen Powell, Screenplay John Patton Ford, from the novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal by Roy Horniman, Ph Todd Banhazl, Pro Des Christian Huband, Ed Harrison Atkins, Music Emile Mosseri, Costumes Jo Katsaras, Dialect coach Douglas N. Honorof.
Blueprint Pictures-StudioCanal.
105 mins. UK/France. 2026. US Rel: 20 February 2026. UK Rel: 13 March 2026. Cert. 15.
