Review: How To Make A Killing

On paper, How to Make a Killing sounds like a sure thing. A remake of the deliciously cruel Kind Hearts and Coronets. Glen Powell on death row, narrating his ascent up (and through) a gilded family tree. Ed Harris glowering as the patriarchal final boss. A24’s stamp of approval. A jaunty, eat-the-rich premise that promises gallows humor with a side of social commentary.

Execution, however, is everything. And John Patton Ford’s film, so meticulous in recreating the bones of its 1949 predecessor, forgets that what made that earlier film sing wasn’t just the blueprint, but the audacity.

We open with Becket Redfellow (Powell), hours from execution, confessing to a priest how he methodically eliminated the wealthy relatives standing between him and his inheritance. Illegitimate son of a disowned Redfellow daughter, Becket grows up working class, fed stories of the fortune that might have been his had the family not cast his mother out. When illness strikes and the Redfellows refuse even the dignity of a burial plot in the family crypt, Becket swears revenge. Years later, armed with a grudge and a voiceover, he begins knocking off the dynasty one by one.

Structurally, it’s faithful. Perhaps too faithful. The confessional framework, the procession of increasingly elaborate deaths, the winking inevitability of it all, it’s all here. What’s missing is the sense of theatrical mischief. The original film’s masterstroke was Alec Guinness playing every doomed aristocrat, turning murder into macabre performance art. Here, the roles are parceled out to a collection of overqualified actors who seem to be performing in entirely different movies.

Bill Camp’s Uncle Warren, an investment banker with a flicker of conscience, appears to have wandered in from a sober moral drama. Margaret Qualley’s Julia, a calculating childhood friend with a taste for seduction and manipulation, is playing screwball femme fatale. Zach Woods dials into sketch-comedy absurdism as a dilettantish cousin. Jessica Henwick, as Becket’s earnest romantic interest Ruth, seems to think she’s in a sincere relationship drama. Ed Harris begins as ominous realism and gradually drifts toward something broader, though not quite broad enough to be funny. The cumulative effect is less ensemble than tonal tug-of-war.

Powell sits at the center of it all, and while he’s a reliably charismatic presence, the role doesn’t play to his strengths. His laid-back ease works when weaponized with charm or swagger; here, he’s asked to anchor a character study, a satire, and a morality tale simultaneously. The film can’t decide whether Becket is a cunning sociopath, a wounded son, or a pawn of capitalism’s cruelty. Powell, game as ever, splits the difference. The result is a protagonist who feels less like a mastermind than a man drifting through a screenplay that keeps changing its mind.

Ford’s direction compounds the problem. Shot with the same grounded naturalism that made Emily the Criminal hum, How to Make a Killing treats its outlandish premise with disarming sobriety. In 1949, you could perhaps get away with improbable poisons and convenient accidents. In 2026, with surveillance cameras and forensic science lurking in the background, the film asks you not to think too hard about how Becket becomes an overnight expert in undetectable murder, or why law enforcement seems content to shrug as Redfellows drop like flies. Contrivances are easier to swallow in heightened worlds. Here, they just sit there.

And then there’s the humor, or rather, the lack of it. The film wants to be arch, but it’s too restrained. It wants sincerity, but it undercuts it with winks. Scene to scene, it oscillates between satire and solemnity without ever blending the two. The individual deaths, which should feel like wicked set pieces, blur together. There’s no escalating joy, no inventive cruelty, just a repetitive march toward an ending that strains for a playful, gotcha revelation. Instead of feeling clever, it feels unearned, like the movie insisting it had a point all along without having done the work to make one land.

What could have been a sharp commentary on wealth, legacy, and the American aristocracy ends up feeling curiously anonymous. Nearly identical to its source yet stripped of its most daring flourish, How to Make a Killing is stuck between homage and update, satire and sincerity. It doesn’t so much murder its darlings as misplace them.

In the end, the film’s greatest casualty isn’t the Redfellow family fortune. It’s momentum. What How to Make a Killing most effectively kills is time.

2/5