‘How To Make A Killing’ – Review Thread

Disowned at birth by his wealthy family, Becket Redfellow will stop at nothing to reclaim his inheritance, no matter how many relatives stand in his way.

Director: John Patton Ford

Cast: Glen Powell, Margaret Qualley, Jessica Henwick, Topher Grace, Ed Harris, Zach Woods

Rotten Tomatoes: 75%

Metacritic: 55 / 100

Some Reviews:

The Wrap – Matt Goldberg – 4 / 5

How to Make a Killing has the acuity to know that even if you are willing to play such a rigged game in ruthless fashion, you’ll still lose. The film’s magic trick is taking this bleak idea and knowing how to find the fun in such brutal sport.

Slash Film – Bill Bria – 7 / 10

Powell's Becket recalls similar upwardly mobile antiheroes like Saul Goodman or Michael Corleone, characters who seem to be living a wish fulfillment of righteousness, only to find themselves trapped by the persona they've built up. It's this aspect which Ford addresses most subtly, ultimately making "How to Make a Killing" a cleverly scathing indictment of the American dream as it stands. It's also an impressively multi-layered indictment, too, for while it'd be easy (and rather popular) for Ford to point out how the haves and the have-nots aren't all that different from each other if they were able to switch places, the filmmaker instead leans into the complexity and systemic issues surrounding wealth and success. "How to Make a Killing" is a movie that sneaks up on you, and like Becket himself, doesn't simply stab you in the chest or punch you in the gut. Instead, it slowly poisons you, leaving you bewildered by the end as to how sick you and the country you live in has become.

AV Club – Jacob Oller – 'C'

At the center of it all is Powell, making the same face for an hour and 45 minutes, too unflappable to root for, too smug to magnetize as an inhuman American Psycho. And How To Make A Killing needed to pick a side, either of clownish class comedy or of bitter sociopathic satire. Its split-difference approach certainly racks up a sizable body count, but its most battered and bruised victim is the truism it keeps hitting: In America, there are no consequences for the rich, unless other rich people desire it. That’s almost funny, in an empty and respectable way, like how a New Yorker cartoon is almost funny, or how Glen Powell is almost a leading man.

Next Best Picture – Matt Neglia – 6 / 10

As someone who absolutely loves any kind of a crime film, “How To Make A Killing” can be entertaining at times as a morality play wrapped in designer suits and generational spite. It’s juggling a lot more than it needs to, and it never fully synthesizes its most perceptive ideas, but it’s powered by another star performance from Powell, keeping it barely afloat.

Slant Magazine – Alexander Mooney – 3 / 4

The brittle humanity of Ford’s characters is the key ingredient to his film’s grim sense of irony. In a media landscape replete with hot-button satires and airless farces, How to Make a Killing’s rejection of formal frippery and easy caricature is refreshing. Ford cultivates an old-school flair while keeping one finger on the pulse of the current moment, shrewdly retooling the canonical story of a rotten family patronage to comment on a quintessential American birthright: the compulsive desire for individual gain.

Variety – Owen Glieberman

It’s likely that 95 percent of the people who go to see “How to Make a Killing” will never have seen, or even heard of, “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” the 1949 British black comedy it’s a remake of — or, I should say, a reimagining, since for once that marketing-spin term applies. In its day, “Kind Hearts and Coronets” was wickedly outrageous. But in the age of “Dexter” and “Succession” and “Beef,” “How to Make a Killing” just plays as a patchy amusement. Yet I was held by it; the film’s acrid riffs on the hidden depravity of the new greed culture keep it aloft. And each time Margaret Qualley shows up, she gives the movie a charge, because of how her Julia incarnates money hunger cut off from everything else. Qualley somehow makes that fun, maybe because it’s the one thing in the movie that everyone can agree on.