It’s likely that 95 percent of the people who go to see “How to Make a Killing” will never have seen, or even heard of, “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” the 1949 British black comedy it’s a remake of — or, I should say, a reimagining, since for once that marketing-spin term applies. The original film, one of the gems of the Ealing Studio era, is considered a classic, and rightfully so, but it’s a classic with a unique flavor of ice-cold debonair English misanthropy. It’s like “And Then There Were None” rewritten by P.G. Wodehouse; it basically puts the audience in the shoes of a civilized serial killer — the conniving hero, Louis (played with delectable matter-of-factness by Dennis Price), who decides to murder, one by one, all eight of the aristocratic relatives who are due to inherit the family fortune before him. The relatives are all played by Alec Guinness in a feat of chameleonic vaudeville that’s the hook of the movie.
The new version, written and directed by John Patton Ford, who made a minor indie splash with his first feature, “Emily the Criminal” (2022), has the same outline as “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” only in this case the relatives are played by different actors, and the movie is busy enough to have a lot more than murder on its mind. It’s a light-fingered drop-dead screw-loose noir — a quasi-satirical mash-up of greed and desperation and Wall Street chicanery and a dash of romance, with Glen Powell, dishy in Brioni suits, turning his pin-eyed handsomeness into a mask of yuppie treachery.
He plays Becket Redfellow, the lowliest member of a preposterously wealthy family. Becket grew up poor, in a downscale neighborhood of Belleville, NJ (his mother was kicked to the curb after getting pregnant out of wedlock). But after dutifully going to work in a clothing store and enduring one insult too many, he decides to go for the money by murdering the seven Redfellow cousins who stand between himself and his inheritance.
He starts off by drowning Taylor (Riff Law), a finance bro. Before long, Becket is dating Ruth (Jessica Henwick), the ingenuous girlfriend of his second victim, Noah (Zach Woods), a “bohemian” photographer so obnoxious (he writes a note to Becket signed, “To Bagel. Love, white Basquiat”) that you’re happy to see him get blown up in his darkroom. And there’s a femme fatale on top of all of this: Becket’s childhood love, Julia, played as an adult with whiplash amorality and leggy aggression by Margaret Qualley, who continues to radiate absolute star quality.
“How to Make a Killing” is as much a parable of our financially treacherous time as Park Chan-wook’s homicidal revenge comedy “No Other Choice.” But where Park’s movie is fueled by over-the-top rage (which seems to have connected at the box office), “How to Make a Killing” invites us to identify with a murderer in such a what-the-hell way that the whole thing plays as a brazen lark. As the cousins, two cast members stand out: Bill Camp, who brings a wry gravitas to the role of an elder statesman of finance, and Topher Grace, who plays a corrupt megachurch pastor with a caffeinated jolt. The funerals are jokey motifs, and the fact that Becket gets away with what he’s doing so easily seems to set “How to Make a Killing” in a world without forensics. That said, he narrates the movie from prison, with four hours to go until his execution, so we know from the start that he’s going to be caught. But the detective on his tail (Motsi Tekateka) never confronts him with a shred of evidence. He’s just highly suspicious of the fact that the Redfellows keep showing up dead.
Glen Powell came to prominence as the geek undercover detective of 100 disguises in Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man,” and here, as in that movie, he carries the audience with his energized sense of play. He’s sleek enough to cruise through a movie like…well, Tom Cruise, and part of it is that he shares Cruise’s projection of quick-fire intelligence. Powell, as Becket, is always thinking, deciding, calculating, and the actor lets it all show through. The film uses murder as a fantasy lever of upscale dreams. The Redfellow wealth is old money — which in the age of the Epstein files is starting to acquire a more sinister aura than ever. When Becket meets the last relative he needs to kill, it’s his grandfather, Whitelaw (Ed Harris), who’s practically molting with entitlement.
In its day, “Kind Hearts and Coronets” was wickedly outrageous. But in the age of “Dexter” and “Succession” and “Beef,” “How to Make a Killing” just plays as a patchy amusement. Yet I was held by it; the film’s acrid riffs on the hidden depravity of the new greed culture keep it aloft. And each time Margaret Qualley shows up, she gives the movie a charge, because of how her Julia incarnates money hunger cut off from everything else. Qualley somehow makes that fun, maybe because it’s the one thing in the movie everyone can agree on.
