‘Promise me that you won’t quit until you have the right kind of life’.
Glen Powell (The Running Man) and Margaret Qualley (The Substance) star in this comedy thriller (always a tricky needle to thread), inspired by 1949’s Kind Hearts and Coronets.
We follow Powell’s Becket, the disgraced child of the Redfellows, a sprawling, snooty dynasty who cut him and his young mother out of the family as soon as she started showing. He’s making an honest and extremely modest living for himself when his old boyhood flame, Julia, reappears in his life and (as you do) playfully suggests that he off each of his estranged relatives until he’s left with the family’s fortune.
Becket wastes no time when it comes to ‘trimming the hedges’ so to speak, swayed by Julia, the temptress, who Qualley injects with an enjoyably off-the-wall quality. She’s got an air of Lady Macbeth to her at times – sliding pawns across the board with relish – but unpredictability is her middle name. The push-and-pull between these two characters is hinted at in the film’s trailers, but plays a far larger role than I initially expected it to. In fact, the film in general feels as though it’s been rather misrepresented by its marketing.
I went into How to Make a Killing expecting a zippy black comedy that poked well-deserved fun at the rich and powerful Redfellows, getting to know each offender well before building a plan to help them shuffle off their mortal coil, but Beckett’s killings (while zany) are far from the main event here. Each one is rather underplayed: the first comes quickly, which feels like an appetiser to settle us into the fun here, but then the rest are similarly easy, too.
Granted, we’ve a lot of relatives to get through – these Redfellows are like rabbits – but I felt there was ample opportunity to make each one feel more memorable, difficult or affecting. We don’t really find much out about Becket through his actions, here, and while Powell continues to be a likeable screen presence to have us following him along, wanting him to succeed (he had me whooping and cheering in the third act of Top Gun: Maverick), our protagonist just feels generally underwritten.
If you’d asked me to tell you two things about him after leaving the cinema, I don’t know that I could have.
He works best alongside Jessica Henwick as Ruth, who stands as the polar opposite of Julia, offering a different kind of escape from the doldrums of his average life. In many ways, the film is really about the prospect of a life spent with one of these two women and what that might mean for Becket and his future, but that thematic choice doesn’t entirely hold water when we’re shown from the very beginning that Becket is narrating all of this from Death’s Row on the day of his execution, recounting his story to a priest who’d really love to just read him his last rites and be elsewhere.
When his story comes full circle and we catch up to the present day, the film’s finale feels anticlimactic and somewhat hollow rather than satisfying – it didn’t feel like the natural conclusion to the story at play here.
Occasionally, this hits the right note. Powell’s third-act showdown against Ed Harris as the foul family’s patriarch has some tension to it and echoes the original film well, and an early scene at a beachside pool party sees Becket narrate his plan step by step to fast-paced jazz in a way that reminded me of The Wolf of Wall Street. However, for a supposed black comedy, I didn’t find much to laugh at – I would’ve liked a more stylish story that really relished in the macabre joy of each takedown in the moment, while also allowing some scope for exploration into the dubiousness of this plan. Does Becket’s quest make him as bad as his targets, even if they, on paper, rather deserve it?
There are flashes when that question is addressed but these are a far cry from what the film really needs to be doing.
In the case of How to Make a Killing, I think its cast would have been able to pull that balancing act between revenge and righteousness. This especially applies to Qualley, who really does the best she can do with what’s she’s been given here. But to be the kind of twisted tale it wants to be (and thinks it is), the film really needed a stronger script or a firmer hand in the director’s seat.
BBFC: Rated 15 for strong language, violence.
How to Make a Killing is in cinemas now.
