Gone are the days when stars seemed to go from strength to strength — when Tom Hanks, for instance, followed Philadelphia with Forrest Gump, and Forrest Gump with Apollo 13, and Apollo 13 with Toy Story. Far more common is the stop-and-start trajectory of even an actress as comely and appealing as Sydney Sweeney, whose megahit Anyone but You was followed by such less-than-megahits as Eden and Americana, until The Housemaid restored her promise.
As it happens, Sweeney’s co-star in Anyone but You, Glen Powell, has had his own share of career oscillations: He seemed as close to a sure bet as any up-and-comer on the strength of that romantic comedy and the two films that followed, the crime caper Hit Man and the cyclone sequel Twisters. But his attempts to establish himself as a consistent hit-maker took a beating with last fall’s The Running Man and will not be helped by his new black comedy, How to Make a Killing. An entirely unnecessary, frequently enervated remake of the 1949 Ealing Studios classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, the film stars Powell as a son of privilege who, finding himself on the outs with his well-to-do family, seeks to grab hold of his fortune by means of murder. Unfortunately, writer-director John Patton Ford has little feel for the American class system, no discernible talent for writing good dialogue, and minimal competency with directing actors.
The film, which is never as jauntily dark as it means to be, begins in the death-row cell of Becket Redfellow (Powell), a convicted murderer of unusually refined manners and striking self-confidence. When a priest joins him to provide spiritual counsel, Becket proceeds to explain, first in person and then in increasingly interminable voice-over, how he arrived at his present state. This is a bad sign, since it means that the movie is likely to have an overelaborate plot in need of constant explication and a tendency to tell more than show. Both are the case here.
As we come to learn, Becket is the only offspring of Mary Redfellow (Nell Williams), an heiress on Long Island whose family is said to be worth $28 billion — the sort of comically high figure indicative of the movie’s cartoonishness. Despite what is shown to be her family’s proclivity for bad behavior, Mary is excommunicated for shacking up with a working-class musician and bearing his child, a scenario that seems more befitting a backstory set in the 1950s than the 1980s (which, given Powell’s age, is the opening act’s likeliest setting). Driven out of the family mansion, mother and child relocate to the less auspicious Belleville, New Jersey — one of the film’s few genuinely funny touches — where Mary whiles away her days in the employ of the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.
Too conveniently, Mary is pushed off-stage with a sudden terminal illness, which enables Becket to take his rightful place in the narrative. In a fluke of estate planning, while Mary and Becket are persona non grata among their kith and kin, Becket could still come into possession of his family’s wealth were he to leapfrog various relatives — the film’s central, ultimately murderous conceit. On her deathbed, Mary exhorts her son to take advantage of this situation in grotesquely self-serving terms at odds with the movie’s overall soak-the-rich ethos. “Promise me that you won’t quit,” she tells him, “until you have the right kind of life.”
When he grows up to become Glen Powell, Becket works, apparently not unhappily, at a men’s store, but he is reminded of his unfulfilled potential when he encounters Julia (Margaret Qualley), an allegedly high-born acquaintance from youth. The character of Julia is a reminder that no contemporary American filmmaker besides Whit Stillman can credibly write for WASPs. The movie has Julia say, upon encountering Becket for the first time in ages, “No f***ing way” — which sounds more like the words of a profane Valley Girl than a resident of, say, Glen Cove. Qualley remains a coarse, unrefined presence throughout, making her an imperfect representative of the station to which Becket aspires.
Inexplicably, given Becket’s social background and Powell’s equable manner, Becket marshals his sense of monetary entitlement and class envy to become a killer: if he dispatches with his older cousins, and a few spare aunts or uncles, Becket can be reunited with his billions. “If I were to prune a few branches of the family tree, where would I start?” Becket asks. This is the plot point that most explicitly borrows from Kind Hearts and Coronets, and while writer-director Ford has surely seen that great film starring Alec Guinness, the evidence here suggests that he is far more familiar with the lesser works of Wes Anderson.
From Anderson, Ford borrows annoyingly centered tracking shots, aggressively executed whip pans, and above all, a penchant for neato montages to set up secondary characters. In this case, that means the various relations of Becket, who are sketched as unsubtly as a New Yorker cartoon panel: among Becket’s soon-to-be-offed family members, there’s a party animal (Raff Law), a supercilious would-be artist (Zach Woods), and, most unaccountably, a hot-tempered megachurch minister (Topher Grace). Who ever imagined such a group as belonging to anything like a noble family? A real-life super-rich family like the Kennedys has enough black sheep for a dozen movies, so why does Ford insist on making his super-rich family so preposterously and randomly over-the-top? Worst of all may be Ed Harris as Becket’s grandfather Whitelaw, a man who appears to live in Wayne Manor, wears a cravat, and says the following line far too seriously: “I want to show you something before Charles brings out the pudding.”
The movie never finds a perspective on the ease with which Becket wills himself to become a serial killer. Is it simple greed, a consequence of social exclusion, or a reflection of some hidden aspect of his character? The most that the film can offer in the way of moral complexity is a subplot revolving around Becket’s late cousin Noah’s girlfriend, a manic pixie dreamgirl called Ruth (Jessica Henwick). Evidently, Ruth is meant to represent all that is good and pure for eschewing the luxe life for the smaller ambition of being a high school English teacher.
But to embark on a moral analysis of How to Make a Killing is to give it undue importance. Simply put, this is a dumb movie, and making it was a dumb move on the part of its aspirant star.
Peter Tonguette is the film critic for the Washington Examiner magazine.
