There is something deeply seductive about the idea of following a character who does terrible things with a disarming smile. That is precisely the promise How to Make a Killing makes to its audience from the very first frame: a man on death row, a story to tell, and the unsettling certainty that, by listening to it, we will end up rooting for him. Written and directed by John Patton Ford — the revelation behind Emily the Criminal — the film is an American reimagining of that vein of British black comedy from the 1940s, inflated with contemporary swagger, stylistic ambition, and the most elegant cruelty. Becket Redfellow, the protagonist played by Glen Powell, was disowned by his wealthy family before he was even born. His mother Mary, thrown out of the house for daring to love the wrong man — a cellist, no less — raised him in a working-class New Jersey neighborhood, teaching him archery, piano, and Dickens’ Great Expectations, shaping him into a would-be aristocrat with scores to settle. On her deathbed, Mary’s final wish is as simple as it is devastating: take your revenge. Bring home what is yours.
“This movie takes multiple genres and flips them on their head, from romantic comedy and film noir to family drama and psychological thriller. It’s big, sexy, and hilarious, playing out like a slow-motion car crash in the best possible way, the kind of movie that exists in its own category. A little dangerous, but very exciting.”
What elevates the film beyond a straightforward thriller is the construction of a completely skewed moral universe, in which the audience is slowly made complicit in every murder. Becket must eliminate six Redfellow heirs before he can reach the patriarch Whitelaw — played by a glacial and monumental Ed Harris — the true Moby Dick of this story. Along the way he encounters an extraordinary gallery of characters: Taylor, a playboy cousin who arrives by helicopter and throws trash bags full of hundred-dollar bills onto his own guests; Noah, a photographer of homeless people who is convinced he is an artist; Pastor Steven, an exuberant evangelist with an electric guitar and a congregation systematically relieved of their savings; Cassandra, a serial philanthropist with children adopted from around the world and no genuine empathy to speak of; McArthur, a space-bound explorer with a cosmic superiority complex; and finally Warren, the only Redfellow with a heart, the only one who takes Becket under his wing. Each victim is a fierce portrait of how money distorts, consumes, and deforms. Ford has built them as real people, not caricatures — which makes every elimination both more unsettling and more cathartic.
Holding this universe together is Glen Powell in what promises to be the most complex and daring role of his career. After Top Gun: Maverick, Hit Man, and Anyone But You, Powell was searching for something that would truly challenge him — something morally uncomfortable and stylistically unclassifiable. He found it in Becket Redfellow, a character who kills out of ambition rather than anger, and who never feels the slightest flicker of guilt. The film bets everything on Powell’s natural charisma: that is how a potentially repugnant story becomes irresistible. Alongside him, Margaret Qualley brings Julia to the screen — a thoroughly modern femme fatale with a Chanel wardrobe and an agenda entirely her own — a lethal and amused counterpoint to the more luminous presence of Jessica Henwick, who plays Ruth, the only non-psychopathic person in the entire cast. The choice between the two women is, ultimately, the film’s true moral question: who is the real Becket Redfellow? And how deep do we really want to go to find out?
The production, helmed by Blueprint Pictures — the company behind The Banshees of Inisherin, led by Graham Broadbent and Peter Czernin — had the ambition to physically construct the film’s two worlds: Becket’s working-class New Jersey and the gilded Long Island of the Redfellows, complete with a Mock Tudor mansion façade that took eight weeks to build. Director of photography Todd Banhazl sought an almost Gothic quality of light for the Redfellow world, the visual texture of a wealth so ancient it feels supernatural. Costume designer Jo Katsaras turned each of Powell’s thirty-five costume changes — with Brioni serving as the narrative thread — into an update of the character’s status. The result is a film that knows exactly what it wants to be: sophisticated, dangerous, entertaining, and profoundly American in the way it tells the story of an obsession with what one feels entitled to deserve.
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