| Worth seeing: | as an oddly entertaining, darkly comic, highly immoral reimagining of the book that inspired Kind Hearts and Coronets |
| Director: | John Patton Ford |
| Featuring: | Glen Powell, Margaret Qualley, Adrian Lukis, Bianca Amato, Bill Camp, Ed Harris, Jessica Henwick, Nell Williams, Raff Law, Ralf Little, Sean C Michael, Topher Grace, Zach Woods |
| Length: | 105 minutes |
| Certificate: | 15 |
| Country: | US |
| Released: | 11th March 2026 |
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Becket Redfellow (Glen Powell) is four hours away from execution. As the priest arrives to hear his final confession and deliver the last rights, he starts to tell the story of the tragedy that led to him finding himself in that situation.
The tragedy begins when his teenaged mother is cut off by her billionaire father, Whitelaw (Ed Harris), when she gets pregnant at the age of eighteen. While the rest of his family grow up with the riches and influence of the Redfellow name, Becket grows up in poverty.
As if that’s not tragic enough, before he’s even reached his teens, his mother dies of an illness that help from her family could have prevented and ends up in foster care.
As an adult, he decides to fulfil the promise he made to his dying mother to fight for what he deserves. She probably didn’t quite have in mind the plan he puts into play – to kill the seven relatives standing between him and the Redfellow fortune.
When several members of the Redfellow family start dying in mysterious circumstances, the FBI get interested in Becket but he manages to keep them at bay – until a chance encounter with a childhood girlfriend, Julie (Margaret Qualley), changes everything.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
Like the 1949 Ealing comedy classic, Kind Hearts And Coronets, How To Make A Killing is inspired by Roy Horniman’s 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal. With a few tweaks and updates, it’s largely the same story, but transferred to contemporary New York.
It’s an odd tale, in which the protagonist – someone we’re clearly being asked to root for – is admitting to being a mass murderer – and it’s not even as though the people he’s killing have done anything objectionable, although the film-makers do their best to try to make us think they deserve, if not a brutal death, at least a slap on the wrist and a hard stare.
Yet, despite this questionable morality, this darkly comic thriller is oddly entertaining and doesn’t make you feel as guilty as you might expect for enjoying it.
The audience is kept on its toes as the manipulative plot unfurls at a nippy pace and Glen Powell is clearly having a lot more fun than the last time we saw him on screen, in The Running Man.
Despite being a self-confessed serial killer, Becket is far from the most unpleasant character on screen – audiences, though, might be divided over who that might be.