There’s a moment about halfway through How To Make A Killing where Margaret Qualley’s Julia laments that she thought Glenn Powell’s Becket Redfellow would be more fun. You may well think the same. After all, this dark comedy draws inspiration from the Ealing comedy, Kind Hearts and Coronets, with Becket cast as the unfortunate missing sheep of a wealthy family. 

When Becket makes a promise to his dying mother that he’ll make something of himself, it triggers his campaign to take out every member of the wealthy Redfellow family, who had disowned his mother at his birth, that lies between him and what he sees as his rightful inheritance. 

It’s so hard to make a compelling film of an unlikable character killing unlikable characters, and How to Make a Killing is probably Exhibit A in why. Of course, there are ways of softening the blow—a sizzling script, incredible jokes, compelling drama or a masterful ending. But this film doesn’t really have any of that and puts all manner of other blocks in the way of us all having a good time with cinema’s latest serial killer.

First, it’s hard to root for the protagonist. The abandonment of Becket’s mother is well-established, but the link between that, his promise that he would pick himself up, and immediate familicide isn’t strong. He could have turned his apparently impressive tenacity, intelligence and skill sets to any manner of wholesome activities; this seems like a waste, no matter how easy his marks. 

Second, it’s hard to root one way or another for those marks. He moves from one to the other, picking them from an unintelligible family tree with only the uncle, who proves Becket could have done very well for himself anyway, passing for relatable.

Powell does his best, pulling out the darker side of his slick movie star presence, but this isn’t his American Psycho. Opposite him, Whalley plays like a noir Femma Fatale, but both are let down by miserably stodgy and simplistic dialogue. Where’s the frisson? Where’s the repartee? There’s very little for either to latch on—it’s a chronic problem. 

The concept, then, is struggling anyway—things just aren’t weird enough. It’s just wannabe rich kids mixing with rich kids when there needed to be some level of palpable psychosis or social dysfunction. Then John Patton Ford, sole writer and director, handicaps it with a lazy confessional conceit. The man on Death Row confessing to a Holy Father is a hoary old concept, and has been on film for decades—Hammer’s Curse of Frankenstein made the most of it nearly 70 years ago. But where How to Make a Killing needed to be slick, immediate and scrappy to add interest to the planning and plotting, the confessional holds us even further away with that unnecessary extra layer. 

One saving grace is Jessica Henwick as Ruth, the girlfriend Becket snatches from his (late) cousin. Her soft, realistic performance stands out in a film of shallow, cheap pokes. She’s possibly only matched by a menacing Ed Harris as the patriarch of the Redfellow family, and effectively Becket’s Big Boss, although he could be in an entirely different film. 

It’s saying something when a line-up of people introducing themselves at a funeral is one of the strongest jokes. With various chapters broken up by deaths, but little chance to get to know the victims, and little pushback from the family at the spate of murders triggering funerals where few of them are concerned enough to show up (the investigative element is perfunctory—it needed something like the police line running through 2025’s Caught Stealing), it’s no surprise that the pace is as disjointed as the tone. 

How to make a Killing only vaguely comes alive when it breaks the mould with some old pan-and-scan montages of money. It’s not that Ford’s direction is unstylish; it’s just that there’s a bit too much of a slog to polish this grift against the mindlessly rich. That said, one benefit is that How to Make a Killing cruises by—unexpected, considering its fairly bloated, unstructured 110-minute run time.