How To Make A Killing Is A Screwy Social Satire That Falls Just Short Of The Mark
Glen Powell is perfectly cast as a cutthroat social climber.
What would you do for all the money in the world? The idea of instant wealth is a far-fetched dream for most of us, but for Glen Powell’s Becket Redfellow, it’s a very real possibility. And it’s one that he’s willing to kill for.
How to Make a Killing, written and directed by Emily the Criminal filmmaker John Patton Ford and loosely inspired by the 1949 Alec Guinness comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, seems like it’s tailor-made for our current era of “eat the rich” satire. A hangdog hero, cutting a bloody, righteous swath through an obscenely wealthy family of privileged ingrates? Sounds satisfying as hell! And in many ways, it is. But How to Make a Killing finds itself in a strange tonal dilemma, torn between being the blackest of black comedies or a satire with a soul. It elects to be both, and as a result, dulls the sharp edges of its blackly comic premise. But thanks to Glen Powell’s charms and a built-in audience bias against the ultra-rich, How to Make a Killing manages to mostly get away with murder.
There’s something a little old-fashioned about How to Make a Killing, which adopts almost beat-for-beat Kind Hearts and Coronets’ rules of succession, despite taking place in contemporary America versus 20th-century British aristocracy. But logical fallacies are the movie’s bread and butter, once you realize that it operates by the heightened rules of blackly comic farces typical of the ‘60s like Dr. Strangelove or Drop Dead Darling. That much becomes clear when Becket strolls into the debaucherous coastal party of the youngest Redfellow, Taylor (Raff Law), without so much as a security check, and manages to drown the drunken partier with a carefully placed rope and anchor.
From that point, Becket becomes a professional killer practically overnight, crafting increasingly elaborate ways to murder his relatives — whether it be discreetly poisoning protein shakes, infiltrating private air hangars to commit some light sabotage, or creating makeshift bombs. It all beggars belief, but you start to buy into it once How to Make a Killing gets into a sort of mercenary rhythm of one absurd murder after another, each punctuated by the same ridiculous funeral procession attended by Becket in yet another ridiculous undercover hat. But it’s when the movie abandons this ruthlessly cynical pace to try to inject some substance and emotion into the proceedings that it starts to fall apart.
Margaret Qualley and Glen Powell often feel like they’re in a different, much more darkly noir, movie.
The problem with How to Make a Killing is that it wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to be a borderline-nihilist farce, but it also wants to mean something like all the other eat-the-rich satires that have followed in the wake of Parasite. This comes in the form of a sweet romance between Becket and beautiful high school teacher Ruth (Jessica Henwick), the girlfriend of one of his victims. Powell, back in his endearing con-man bag that he perfected in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, manages to carry the movie’s pivot to earnestness by sheer virtue of his charm, but can’t completely sell the somewhat slapdash romance between Becket and Ruth. Combined with Becket’s unlikely fondness for his reformed Uncle Warren (Bill Camp, injecting some surprising heart into a heartless affair), How to Make a Killing takes a somewhat sluggish pause to really emphasize that money isn’t the answer to everything…until the movie gets back to business and says maybe it is.
Qualley, all pursed lips and long legs, is fully locked into the more absurd side of this movie, often feeling like she’d strolled straight out of a “how to be a femme fatale” manual. She’s all affect and artifice, which clashes spectacularly with the film’s halfhearted attempts at sentimentality. Topher Grace and Zach Woods play the arrogant, entitled Redfellow brats well, even if their screentime is brief. Ed Harris, too, feels perfectly cast as the sinister Redfellow patriarch, though he’s similarly underutilized. It makes one wonder if How to Make a Killing could have better sold its farcical nature if, like in the original British film where Alec Guinness played all the family members, all the Redfellows were played by one actor.
But despite some lulls and sentimental detours, How to Make a Killing always circles back to the deeply cynical — which could potentially alienate some viewers hoping for a cathartic eat-the-rich moment. But watching a decades-old story adapted for modern times creates an odd sort of horseshoe effect; sometimes the farce gets a little too close to reality. And maybe that’s the true insight of How to Make a Killing: there’s nothing left to satirize when real life is stranger than fiction.
