Not to be confused with a 2024 French black comedy also with the title How to Make a Killing (in English at least), this is the one from 2026 starring Glen Powell that’s a remake of 1949’s Kind Hearts and Coronets. It is, you know, OK, demonstrating (yet again) how good those Ealing chaps were at cranking out superficially slight comedies containing a concealed stiletto.
Director/adapter John Patton Ford updates things to the 21st century, where little Becket Redfellow (Powell as an adult, Grady Wilson as a kid) is born into a wealthy family but is kicked out of it when his mother marries beneath her. Having grown up broke, and having promised his mother on her deathbed that he “won’t stop until you have the right sort of life you deserve to have…” Becket sets out on a killing spree, eliminating one family member after another in an attempt to inherit the family fortune.
Crucially, in Kind Hearts and Coronets, all the family members were played by Alec Guinness, and very good he was at it too. There are no such tricks here – Bill Camp is one related Redfellow (a pretty decent one at that), Topher Grace another (never seen Grace being this animated), Bianca Amato another… and so on. Death comes in a variety of comic ways – one goes over the side of a boat tied to an anchor, another swallows poisonous teeth-whitening gel and so on. All the way up to the top, where Becket is required to kill patriarch/wily old bastard Whitelaw Redfellow (Ed Harris).
What the “right sort of life” might be is the big idea. Becket originally thinks it is to live in the manner to which he should have been accustomed all along. But when he meets Ruth (Jessica Henwick), a sweetie-pie who loves him for what he is and has no idea he’s minted (potentially), he is forced to think again. In the opposing camp is Julia, the rich little girl he fell for before he was forced out of the Redfellow family orbit, who has grown up to become a breathy sex dynamo. Is Julia subliminally urging Becket onward to the goal of unimaginable wealth via acts of calculated murder? That’s one of the games Ford’s script plays with the viewer. She knows what he’s up to… right? Either way, Margaret Qualley is the best thing in the movie by a panting country mile.
Though it must be said that something in the character of Becket does really suit Powell. The neediness, the impostor syndrome, the nervousness of the coming man.
Remember when the Coens had a go at another Ealing comedy classic, The Ladykillers? And what difficulty they had with it? How to Make a Killing’s troubles are all too familiar if you do. It struggles with tonal shifts and because it never gets its light-heartedness right it lacks jauntiness, the spoonful of sugar required to make the medicine (serial murder) go down.
The inescapable thing about Becket is that he’s doing alright, he really is, especially once he’s been given a job in the brokerage firm of Uncle Warren (Camp). Suddenly he isn’t part of the precariat any more and the movie’s political angle – soak the one per cent! – evaporates, leaving Powell high and dry.
Without that motivating sharpness his character lacks something and the drama seems just a touch routine. Put another way, there’s nothing wrong with this film that not comparing it to the original won’t fix.
How to Make a Killing – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
