Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Hitting the right tone is tricky when your goal is a specific sort of social comedy laced with darkness—a story where murders are played for laughs, for instance. Let's take a random (I'm kidding) example: Kind Hearts and Coronets begins with the arrival of an executioner to the jailhouse, where his next "client" awaits an appointment the following morning. The hangman is slightly abashed about executing a Duke, the doomed man decides that his morning schedule will preclude "the conventional hearty breakfast"—that kind of wry humor. We track the black comedy, and feel the light touch is just right.
In the opening of How to Make a Killing, which is an updated remake of Robert Hamer's 1949 film Kind Hearts and Coronets, a similar tone is struck—and there's even a "last meal" joke. When the condemned man, Becket Redfellow (Glen Powell), is awakened in the wee hours by a priest, his sangfroid is unbreakable. He does note that his final meal request has been fumbled, however; he ordered the vanilla pudding and they brought chocolate. "Kill me now," he shrugs.
And so How to Make a Killing is off and running, as it flashes back to Becket's account of being an ostracized member of a very wealthy family. Born out of wedlock, shunned by the dynasty's patriarch (Ed Harris), Becket knows that a quirk in the family trust would allow him to inherit a fortune if a handful of elder relatives were to die before him. Two women interrupt this journey at various times, a superrich childhood friend (Margaret Qualley) and the unsuspecting widow (Jessica Henwick) of one of his inconvenient relatives.
Give this to writer-director John Patton Ford (whose Emily the Criminal was an impressive debut): He displays great confidence that there's an audience capable of navigating this kind of comedy. Having an unsympathetic, indeed murderous, hero is a chancy move, at least at the multiplex level. There are tactics in How to Make a Killing that serve to soften the material, but mostly the movie goes for it.
I wish it caught fire a little more often. Emily the Criminal had a persuasive nocturnal mood and a propulsive rhythm that this film doesn't match. It does have Glen Powell, who can play the ethically challenged rather well (see also Richard Linklater's Hit Man), and whose tinny lightness is good for the part—the opening Death Row scene is marked by Powell's deft body language, as though Becket were waking up in anticipation of a bracing morning swim. On the other hand, that lightness is a limit, and becomes rather blank at times.
If it doesn't exactly kill, the movie is enjoyable, especially if you don't have Kind Hearts and Coronets to compare it to. Last week Emerald Fennell's outrageous "Wuthering Heights," and coming soon Maggie Gyllenhaal's warp on The Bride—is there a counterculture audience out there ready for all this? We'll see.
February 20, 2026
