Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick) plays the central character Becket Redfellow in this black crime comedy about a disinherited man who tries to acquire his family’s fortune by killing all the relatives who stand in the way of his inheritance. It’s essentially a remake of the 1949 English classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which the son of a woman disowned by her aristocratic family for marrying out of her social class decides to take the family’s dukedom by murdering the eight people ahead of him in the line of succession to the title.
No doubt the dukedom in the English film came with wealth as well, but in this contemporary American version it’s all about money, with the setting changed from Edwardian England to modern-day New York.
It’s an irresistible plotline and I’d heard good reports about director John Patton Ford’s debut 2022 movie Emily The Criminal, so to the cinema I went.
The movie opens with Becket Redfellow in prison, four hours away from being executed and giving his final confession to a chaplain, by means of which the backstory unfolds.
His mother Mary (Nell Williams) got pregnant with him when she was a teenager, whereupon her cold-hearted father, Whitelaw Redfellow (Ed Harris) banishes her from the family and its massive fortune. She raises Becket as a battling single mother, the father having absented himself immediately after the birth.
Mary has told him all about the injustice done to her and urged him never to abandon his birthright. After she dies he goes off to visit his billionaire grandfather in hopes of being taken into the family fold, but the nasty old coot gives him the bum’s rush.
Triggering things happen. He’s demoted from his nowhere job as a menswear salesman. Then there’s a chance encounter with Julia (Margaret Qualley), a childhood crush who’s become gorgeous and successful. She remembers him and they exchange pleasantries but she makes it clear he’s way out of her league.
He comes up with the dastardly plan. He’ll bump off all eight of the cousins, aunts and uncles ahead of him in line to the Redfellow fortune, become mega-rich and show the world he’s no loser.
He starts with his cousin Taylor (Raff Law), an obnoxious Wolf-of-Wall-Street type party boy. He gets onto his yacht by disguising himself as one of the crew when they’re all drunk, and seeing a hungover Taylor lying on the deck in the morning he puts the anchor chain to mischievous use.
He goes to the funeral to get close to other family members, and starts bumping them off one by one. There’s cousin Noah (Zach Woods), a wanker of an artist who signs his autographs ‘the white Basquiat’. Topher Grace plays a megachurch evangelist with a Trumpian orange tan and dodgy drug-lord connections. Good riddance all round.
It gets more complicated from here on. It turns out nice Uncle Warren (Bill Camp) has always felt guilty about the way the family treated his sister Mary and her child and he gives Becket a job in his investment firm. He’s crossed off the murder list.
Warren encourages Becket to pursue his love of late cousin Noah’s girlfriend Ruth, who’s a Good Woman unlike Julia, who turns out to be a femme fatale and who plays a crucial role in the outcome.
There are more fatalities and of course we’re all waiting for the nasty old man to get his comeuppance, but by now things have become quite twisted plotwise. Nor do they end at the point where the story started – in Becket’s prison cell on the eve of his execution. I’ll say no more about that.
How To Make a Killing has some good jokes but there’s something humdrum about the storytelling. The main problem I think is the tone. The love story and the niceness of Uncle Warren don’t sit well with what should be the blackly comic aspects of a black comedy. We shouldn’t be asked to meditate on the morality of what Becket is doing. It should be more cartoonish, more dastardly, more like a farce than a mildly satirical police procedural.
But it’s entertaining enough. Now I’m going to have to find the old English version. I’ve never seen it, but I bet the Brits nail the tone perfectly.
Fun fact: ‘How to Make a Killing’ was filmed in Cape Town, South Africa. I have no idea why.