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“How to Make a Killing” boasts an opening so strong that it buys enough audience goodwill to coast through nearly its entire running time. That’s priceless in a screwball murder movie in which everyone’s soul is for sale.
Death row inmate Becket Redfellow (Glen Powell) is four hours away from execution. A priest (Sean C. Michael) solemnly arrives to take his final confession and finds the condemned man lounging in a sleeping eye mask, griping that his last meal served him the wrong flavor of cheesecake. “Kill me now,” Becket quips.
This will be a tale of crime and punishment told in flashback, rewinding to Becket’s mother, an heiress excised from an eleven-figure fortune for giving birth as an unwed teenager. And it will be, as Becket insists, “a tragedy.”
But while the story’s framework is familiar, what gives this intro sequence zip is Powell’s sly nonchalance, the little bounce he makes on his cot when Becket pivots to give the flabbergasted priest his full attention. He has ours, too. Powell has yet to find his perfect role (this one’s close) but his confidence is why the industry is convinced that he’s the reincarnation of a classic leading man: Tom Cruise or Cary Grant if we’re lucky, or at least Bugs Bunny.
Writer-director John Patton Ford’s morally bleak comedy is itself a reincarnation of the 1949 British caper “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” which egged on an exiled sire as he avenges himself upon his royal family by murdering everyone between himself and dukedom. The 21st century American privilege that Becket is chasing in the remake doesn’t rely on formal titles. He wants cold hard cash, plus a couple of private islands, planes and ultra-luxury yachts. Besides, he’s already got a first name that sounds like a last name, signifying the American upper crust.
This Dickensian vengeance setup gives us an awful lot of people to murder, all caricatures of the elite. The original “Coronets” offed a posh feminist who scattered political leaflets across London from a hot air balloon, Ford spins that passé joke into a gag where Becket’s spoiled cousin (Raff Law) hovers in a helicopter sprinkling money over a pool party and then for good measure, cannonballs into the water to stuff bills in the crowd’s open and appreciative mouths. (For his next trick, perhaps Ford will remake Terry Southern’s outlandish satire “The Magic Christian,” which has a scene like that but five times filthier.)
Lore goes that when Alec Guinness received the “Coronets” script with an offer to play four of the ill-fated tycoons, he wrote back greedily and said, “Why not eight?” To our good fortune, Guinness did play all eight, even the suffragette. “How to Make a Killing” shares the wealth, giving cameos to a very funny Zach Woods as the scion who fancies himself a hipster artist (he takes photos of the unhoused) and Topher Grace as the Redfellow who found faith or, rather, a more sanctimonious spin on grift as a megachurch pastor. Likening himself to Jesus, Grace’s bleached blond huffs, “Don’t hate on me just because my dad’s a big deal.”
There’s a tease of real-world critique in how the preacher has decorated his office with framed photos of himself with various presidents and drug-runners, alluding to the inescapable suspicion that the world is run by a powerful club whose only admissions requirement is a bank balance with plenty of zeros. The jabs stop at allusions — they’re entertaining but as thin as a communion wafer. Still, I guffawed when Becket popped back into his present-day cell to poke fun at his audience, the Catholic priest: “The last thing the Church wanted was an investigation,” he says with a smirk. “I’m sure you know all about that.”
Like his lead character, Ford himself had to ascend in clout to direct this script, which he launched on the Black List in 2014. He instead made his debut with the much-smaller 2022 indie “Emily the Criminal,” which starred Aubrey Plaza as an art student desperate to pay off her student loans. His heart is with the strivers who find that our K-shaped economy makes it impossible to go straight.
Yet he hasn’t cracked whether the corpses in “How to Make a Killing” are victims themselves. The rich Redfellows get dispatched one by one in scenes that are fun but empty — neither cathartic nor comic, simply boxes to be checked off to great big poundings of thunder and harpsichords.
Surely, I thought, the film will figure out how it feels by the time it offs a Redfellow who’s merely ordinary-terrible: Bill Camp’s drunken, cowardly banker. But it doesn’t and the real victim of the indecision is Powell, who is rarely given a reaction to play. (Guilt? Rage? Glee?) He needs to give us an extra hint how he’s feeling — as an actor, Powell is so slick that even his regular smile comes across phony. I’d say he couldn’t be sincere if he tried, except Powell actually does try for one scene and the bleary, terrified look in his eyes is devastating.
While the promise of that gangbusters opening sequence goes a tad unfulfilled, “Killing” has two strong twists and plenty of reasons to enjoy the romp. I suspect that the movie might be too smart for its own good, or perhaps hemmed in by a cynicism that, everywhere we look lately, it appears that crime does pay. As Becket says early on, “We’re all adults here.” Ford sees all the wrong moves and isn’t sure-footed in choosing the right one, even though I think he has. Today’s crowd wants to smash Marie Antoinette’s cake and eat it, too.
At least along the way, there’s a playful love triangle between Julia (Margaret Qualley), the privileged nightmare who’s had Becket wrapped around her pinky finger since grade school, and Ruth (Jessica Henwick), a humble school teacher. Both characters stake out their polarized corners — the rich bitch versus the sweetheart — with Qualley somehow always arranging her legs to be seductively horizontal in her too-few scenes. Henwick is saddled with the more prosaic role and dialogue (“It’s scary to dream small,” she says). Nevertheless, her presence is so compelling that we root for Ruth every time she’s onscreen.
I’m glad that Ford is part of today’s guillotine crew making capers about economic inequality. But the best shot in the movie shows his promise as a romantic comedian: Becket and Ruth bump into each other in the rain and just as they make eye contact, the sun comes out and they share a smile. It’s a tiny moment of magic that gives you hope that these young lovers can work it out. Better still, it even gives you hope for humanity, even if the movie’s overall forecast for society is stormy.
‘How to Make a Killing’
Rated: Rated R, for language and some violence/bloody images
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Playing: In wide release Friday, Feb. 20
