How To Make A Killing evaluate: This clumsy, lackluster reboot is missing in enjoyable or stress – and its remaining twist falls utterly flat

How To Make A Killing (15, 105 mins)

Brian Viner:

Rating:

The greatest of all Ealing comedies, the 1949 master­piece Kind Hearts And Coronets, really should be left to rest in eternal peace and everlasting appreciation.

Instead, in How To Make A Killing, it is clumsily exhumed and given a modern American setting, with Glen Powell as the conniving murderer who stands to inherit a fortune if he can just knock off the seven relatives ahead of him in line.

This is director John Patton Ford’s second feature. His first was 2022’s Emily The Criminal, a pulsating thriller about a credit card fraudster played by Aubrey Plaza, which seemed to announce a filmmaker of real talent.

How To Make A Killing stars Glen Powell (pictured) as a conniving murderer who stands to inherit a fortune if he can just knock off the seven relatives ahead of him in line

The strong cast is led by Powell as well as Margaret Qualley, as a scarlet-lipsticked femme fatale

Alas, there isn’t much of it on show here, with a decent cast led by Powell and Margaret Qualley, as a scarlet-lipsticked femme fatale, doing their utmost to pump life (and indeed death) into a lacklustre script light on wit, tension, fun or anything else that might reward the effort of making it through to a final twist that isn’t even all that twisty.

The story is related in flashback, after Becket Redfellow (Powell), awaiting execution on Death Row, starts telling a priest his life story.

His late mother, when she got pregnant out of wedlock, was shunned by her gazillionaire father and raised Becket in working-class New Jersey, always telling him never to quit until ‘you have the right kind of life’.

So, with the inheritance still glinting from afar, that’s his mission. He duly sets about killing his kinsfolk in various sneaky ways, in one case with poisoned teeth-whitener, knowing what riches will come to him after seven funerals at the family mausoleum.

Of course, in Kind Hearts And Coronets the relatives were all played by one actor: the mighty Alec Guinness. How To Make A Killing shows none of that inventiveness; in fact it’s hard to know whether to call it a comedy, a thriller, a neo-noir or a melodrama. Let’s settle for… dud.

Matthew Bond:

Rating:

Glen Powell’s latest film is essentially a remake of the old Ealing Studios classic, Kind Hearts And Coronets. But where that staple of so many rainy Sunday afternoons starred Alec Guinness, one of the finest actors of his generation, How To Make A Killing, stars… well, er, Powell, who (sticking my neck out here) is not.

The film is loosely inspired by 1949’s Kind Hearts and Coronets, which saw Alex Guinness play eight characters

Yes, he’s undeniably a handsome hunk who can usefully grace a decent rom-com, but is there really much going on behind those smooth, sculpted features? Those who answer with a firm ‘yes’ will find the next hour-and-three-quarters more enjoyable than I did.

Powell plays Becket Redfellow, whose mother is thrown out of the palatial family seat by her billionaire father when she becomes pregnant at the age of 18. 

But as she explains to her son before tragically dying a decade or so later, while they may have been thrown out of the family home they can’t be thrown out of the family trust.

All young Becket has to do is wait for the seven relatives who stand in his way to die. Or, of course, he could accelerate the process a tad.

‘Call me when you’ve killed them all,’ jokes his childhood friend, Julia, who may be about to marry someone else but still takes a flirtatious interest in Becket, even when he’s only scraping a living as a tailor’s assistant. An idea is born… just not a very original one.

In fairness, Powell is taking on the equivalent of the role played by Dennis Price in Kind Hearts; Guinness made the film his own by playing all the doomed relatives. But sheer familiarity limits our enjoyment of what ensues.

But there’s still some fun to be had as Becket discovers that murder is complicated – he ends up really liking one of his intended victims and is romantically involved with the girlfriend of another – and Margaret Qualley always catches the eye as the enigmatic Julia.

But if this is saving a rainy Sunday afternoon in 30 years’ time, I’ll be very surprised.