John Patton Ford, “How to Make a Killing” (2026)
Inspired by and loosely based on the 1949 British crime comedy caper “Kind Hearts and Coronets’, notable for its star Alec Guinness playing eight characters and itself based on the 1907 novel “Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal” by Roy Horniman, “How to Make a Killing” has quite an illustrious background. With John Patton Ford at the helm as scriptwriter and director, this is a fast-moving satirical morality play in which the cast, led by affable Glen Powell, portray character types – which may help explain why the film comes across more as light fluff than as an indictment of American neo-capitalism and the culture and mentality it produces in the twilight years of US (and Western) economic power.
As in “Kind Hearts …” in which the anti-hero is writing his memoirs and explaining how and why he ended up in prison, to be hanged for murder, Becket Redfellow (Powell) is on death row confessing his sins to a priest (Adrian Lukis) in the final hours before his execution. Like a bad novelist, Becket has to start right at the very beginning of his sorry tale, in which his teenage mother Mary is turfed out of the obscenely rich Redfellow family for falling pregnant to a (gasp!) lowly musician and refusing to abort the foetus. As a single mother working and bringing up her child in a lower-class neighbourhood, Mary nevertheless strives to give young Becket a lifestyle he can aim for as an adult. At some point during his childhood, Becket meets Julia Steinway, a girl from a wealthy family, and their attraction is immediate and mutual. Too soon though, Mary is diagnosed with an incurable disease: on her deathbed in hospital, she whispers to Becket that he should “fight for the life he deserves to have”. The boy is later swept up in the tender mercies of the New Jersey state foster care system after his appeal for help is rejected by his wealthy relatives.
Years later, working in an upscale men’s suit and clothing store, Becket meets the now-married Julia (Margaret Qualley) again, and she starts dropping hints about him climbing back into the Redfellow family. When he is sacked from his clothing store job, Becket takes up Julia’s challenge: from researching his family history, he discovers six relatives ahead of him due to inherit the massive multi-billion-dollar fortune from his grandfather Whitelaw (Ed Harris) and resolves to eliminate them all to claim his rightful share. From this moment on, the wheels of fickle Fortune start to grind inexorably: after killing off cousin Taylor (Raff Law), Becket meets Taylor’s dad Warren (Bill Camp) at the funeral, who offers him Taylor’s old job in his (Warren’s, that is) financial investment firm. Becket starts making good money in a steady, if hectic job while planning to knock off two other relatives, Noah (a hilarious Zach Woods) and Pastor Steven (Topher Grace). The Fates reward Becket for sending Noah and Steven to their maker by giving him Noah’s girlfriend Ruth (Jessica Henwick) and the two become a couple. Two more relatives, Cassandra and MacArthur, follow Noah and Steven to the grave, and only kindly Uncle Warren and mysterious Grampy Whitelaw now stand in Becket’s way of reclaiming his rightful place in the family hierarchy.
While all this is going on, two FBI agents (Stevel Marc and Phumi Tau) are following Becket and occasionally interviewing him, though they apparently do not suspect him of murder, and Julia drops by now and again to ask him for a loan for her husband Lyle, which Becket consistently refuses. At long last, after Warren’s death from a heart attack, Julia reveals to Becket that she has evidence of his murders and blackmails him into delivering money to her husband. Becket does so, and forgoes his engagement party with Ruth to meet Whitelaw for the first time for evening dinner. Little does Becket know what the old fellow has actually invited him for.
The film might have worked better had it been conceived as a psychological study, similar to Park Chanwook’s recent outing on a similar theme, “No Other Choice”, in which Becket finds himself sliding from being a decent if ingenuous young man, keen to improve his financial status and misinterpreting his dying mother’s admittedly vague wish, into a serial murderer devoid of real feeling who finds killing people easy and fun. There is little character development even as the camera features many close-ups of Powell’s face which could have given the actor opportunities to portray Becket in various stages of moral decay, going from anxiety to worry to occasional nervousness (as he gets better at killing) and finally sadistic relish and even giddy anticipation. That most of the relatives save Warren who stand in Becket’s way are either obnoxious or fatuous people, without whom the world is a far better place – Pastor Stephen is a scumbag TV evangelist and MacArthur exploits his low-wage factory employees so he can fly expensive planes – should be a collective juicy asset that nudges the audience into rooting for an increasingly corrupted character who, by the end of the film, discovers himself in a far more hellish place, literally as well as psychologically, than on death row. In such a psych study too, Margaret Qualley’s Julia would be recognisable as a Mephistophelean character who, through suggestion, blackmail and (perhaps) even setting up critical life-changing incidents, nudges him further into his downward spiral while the FBI agents might appear as angels trying in their own way to guide Becket back to the light.
In the environment as scripted and directed by John Patton Ford, the actors do what they can in a fast-paced, glitzy New York (actually Cape Town in South Africa) in a series of black comedy skits that, in tone and emotion, remain even and provide no sense of escalation to an inevitable climax followed by terrible downfall. We are not encouraged to view Becket as a tragic figure venturing into darker, deeper, more troublesome moral territory in an absurdist universe. Jessica Henwick’s earnest hippie-girl character is never given half a chance to pull Becket away from Qualley’s femme fatale allure. The film’s conclusion goes some way to making up for its plot and character flaws as Becket, returning to the Redfellow mansion with Julia, starts to wonder if fighting for the life he thought he deserved was worth losing the love of a woman who might – just might – have represented something genuine and warm.