How to Make a Killing (2026 | USA | 105 minutes | John Patton Ford)
For a hot minute, the otherworldly charisma of Glen Powell seemed like it might just be Hollywood’s greatest untapped resource, an infinite source of screen presence that could catapult any harebrained project into box office gold. Years after toiling in smaller roles (including as a college baseball bro in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!! and as John Glenn in Hidden Figures), he nearly committed the cardinal sin of upstaging Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick. But it turned out that Cruise seemed to like having a would-be successor waiting in the wings. Instead of banishment to a life of house-flipping, Powell became the subject of smiling quokka memes and catapulted to making silly movies about fighting tornadoes and faking being in love with Sydney Sweeney into credible nights at the movies.
Perhaps his best role in this Glenaissance was in Hit Man (another Linklater gem) as a dorky psychology professor who found his inner sexy rogue by moonlighting as a sort-of honey trap for New Orleanians seeking to have their problems resolved via murder-for-hire. Having been so goddamned charming in a series of vignettes in which he dressed up as killers, fell in love with one of his marks, and flipped the tables on his good reputation, it makes a lot of sense that John Patton Ford tapped him to star in his loose re-imagining of 1949 black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets. The setup is dastardly yet simple: to inherit a fortune, an outcast man needs only to eliminate everyone on the family tree ahead of him in the line of succession.
With a money-hungry killer as hero, you’re going to need someone exceptionally charming to keep the audience on board. Powell might be up to the task, but the movie has no idea what to do with himself and commits so many sins of storytelling that it wastes his abilities at every turn. The film’s most insurmountable error is that it’s also told through the tired framing device of a prisoner on death row spending his final hours of life recounting his tale of self-interested serial killings. Unlike the viewing audience who’s paying for the privilege of watching the movie, it’s the vocation of a jailhouse priest to sit there and listen to this dull tale. At least his good works might get him into heaven; the rest of us will just be counting down the minutes until the credits grant us a reprieve.
Voiceover narration is often a lazy filmmaking crutch, but sometimes it can be used to creative ends with unreliable narration or subverted expectations. Here, though, it’s pretty much a straight-ahead slog. Powell plays a perpetually smirking Becket Whitelaw, seemingly unrepentant for committing a string of murders and untroubled by the clock ticking away toward his pending execution (his main complaint is that his last meal included the wrong kind of cheesecake). In quick succession, he recounts his sad tale: his mother was permanently exiled from her old money family for bringing her unplanned pregnancy to term; his father died embarrassingly before getting to know his son, leaving the two of them to the horrors of a middle-class life raised by a single mother in New Jersey. Before her own tragic exit, Becket raised her little son to be a well-cultured, entitled little snob and swear to live “the right kind of life”, since — due to the plot contrivances required for the movie to exist — he still stood to inherit the fortune held in the family’s trust if he outlived all the other claimants. Also, as a child, he had a crush on a rich, mean girl whom he last saw when he was eleven years old.
Thankfully, his tale fast-forwards past the gauzy child actors portion to find an adult Becket working as a pants-folder in an upscale New York men’s clothing store. Out of nowhere, his childhood crush (now played by Margaret Qualley) drops in to play what will become an annoyingly one-note role, letting him know she’s still alive, engaged to another man, but money-hungry enough to give him the time of day if he had somehow turned out to be obscenely wealthy. Confronted with her hotness and a pending demotion at work, he sets about on the grim business of hunting down and killing a bunch of relatives.
It’s a fun setup for an ensemble piece, but in Becket’s telling, his cousins are so easily dispatched that watching it feels like a literal death march. We don’t learn much about them, the storyteller faces no obstacles or personal growth, and the crimes aren’t even that creative. A debauched finance bro played by Raff Law does a bit of jestermaxxing at insane parties before exiting this mortal coil. Topher Grace hams it up briefly as a paranoid megachurch pastor who’s overdone it with looksmaxxing treatments. As a parody of a morally vacant artist whose photography fame has been propped up by privilege instead of talent, Zach Woods has slightly more to do once he meets Becket at his fantasy of a TriBeCa loft. (It’s here that Jessica Henwick enters as the film’s manic pixie dream girl, jaded by the chase of the fashion world and ready to settle into the honorable world of teaching.) I had to look at the cast to even remember that Bianca Amato appears as a performative philanthropist who collects orphans, and Alexander Hanson has a brief turn as an uncle who burns money on hobbyist aeronautics.
Bizarrely, despite having no connection to them, Becket keeps showing up at family funerals, barely raising an eyebrow, let alone any suspicions aside from some bumbling FBI agents. The repetition makes for a good little visual joke, but it’s also required for him to meet the only decent member of the family, a rich but saintly uncle who gives him a great job that he’s not at all qualified for at his family’s ethical investment bank. Bill Camp does what he can to make a human out of the cardboard cutout role, but the arrival of a kindly family member and a rapid ascent into nepotistic financial success barely occasion anything resembling reflection or growth.
Such is the prison of the necessarily boxed-in nature of a confessional storyline as told by a shallow and unreflective narrator. There are barely zigs, let alone zags. Qualley’s character keeps appearing to shove the plot toward an eventual Big Boss confrontation with the shadowy patriarch played with familiar menace by Ed Harris. Despite being populated by a lot of actors who often elevate anything they touch, there’s nothing new or remotely human to be found in any of the competently slick presentation. It feels like what you’d get if you asked an AI to spin up an impersonation of an edgy A24 dark comedy. There’s acceptable production design, a nice new original score from Emile Mosseri, and an uncanny valley sense that this should somehow be better. But trapped in the storybook framework everything transpires with such relative ease and minimal intrigue, it’s hardly surprising that no one learns, changes, or even considers doing so. The real shock, though, is that the combined star power isn’t bright enough to distract us from noticing.
How to Make a Killing arrives in theaters on Feb 20th
Image courtesy of A24