‘How to Make a Killing’

There is a version of How to Make a Killing that is one of the best films of the year. You can feel it in the first hour, in the confidence of the setup, the sharpness of the premise, the specific pleasure of watching a man with nothing systematically dismantle a family that had everything. That version exists. John Patton Ford almost made it.

What he actually made is still very good. Just not quite great.

Glen Powell plays Becket Redfellow, disowned at birth by his grotesquely wealthy family and now, as an adult, working his way through them one by one in an attempt to reclaim what was always technically his. It is a delicious premise, part dark comedy, part inheritance thriller, part class revenge fantasy, loosely inspired by the 1949 British classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, a film so precise in its satirical cruelty that it has never been properly equalled. Ford does not equal it here either, but he gets closer than most would dare to try.

Powell is doing something genuinely interesting in this film. He has spent the last few years building a specific kind of stardom, the affable, slightly dangerous charmer who always seems one half-smile away from getting away with something, and here Ford uses that quality as the actual engine of the plot. Becket is likeable in ways that should be impossible given what he is doing, and Powell never lets you forget either half of that sentence. It is not his flashiest performance but it may be his most controlled.

Margaret Qualley is exactly as good as she always is, which is to say better than the film strictly requires. She brings an energy to every scene she is in that makes you wish the script had given her more to do. There is a version of this film where her character is the most dangerous person in the room, and the glimpses of that version are tantalising.

The supporting cast, Ed Harris, Bill Camp, Topher Grace, Zach Woods, is the kind of ensemble that signals a filmmaker who knows what he is doing. Ford shoots the whole thing with the clean, slightly cold visual elegance you expect from an A24 production: expensive-looking without being showy, stylish without announcing itself.

All of which makes the final twenty minutes so frustrating.

The film runs out of momentum precisely when it needs to accelerate. What should be a tightening noose becomes a loose thread. The pacing slackens, the wit that had been the film's primary weapon goes quiet, and we are left waiting for a conclusion that arrives slightly after we have stopped holding our breath for it. It is not a bad ending. It is simply not an ending equal to the first hour that preceded it.

Ford made Emily the Criminal in 2022, a film that committed completely to its premise and was better for it. How to Make a Killing hints at that same commitment without fully delivering on it. The bite is there. The teeth are just a little blunt.

Still worth your time. Still worth your money. Just don't be surprised if you leave the cinema thinking about what it could have been as much as what it was.