Glen Powell is a charismatic actor. So, is he leading man material? His Running Man remake and late sorta-sequel Twisters put him into those roles, and while I actually liked Twisters, I don’t think either of those movies quite put him into the sort of sphere where people might actually want to see a movie because he’s in it. That may be due to the fact that he works better as a supporting actor, or that he needs to pick some better movies to showcase his talents as a more “everyman” sort of actor.
Well, someone is trying again with the new movie How to Make a Killing.
Becket Redfellow (Powell) is sitting on death row, hours away from his execution, when a priest comes to hear his confession. Becket seems rather chipper, so he decides to relate his life story and how he got where he is at that moment, starting with how his cold grandfather Whitelaw (Ed Harris) disowned and banished his mother Mary (Nell Williams) when the headstrong Nell refused to get an abortion at the age of 18. Becket’s childhood was a little rough, but he was told from a young age that he was the youngest heir of the vast Redfellow estate, something Whitelaw set up in an iron-clan trust fund that, upon Whitelaw’s death, it will go to his oldest surviving descendant, no matter who that person is. As Becket grows up and his life gets worse due to the simple fact that, no matter what he is going to, he gets no financial help from the Redfellows.
However, a chance encounter with his childhood crush Julia (Margaret Qualley) gives him an idea: maybe he can murder his way to the inheritance? That means he has to actually interact somewhat with his estranged family, and while most of them are sketchy at-best, he does manage to get a finance job from his uncle Warren (Bill Camp), who actually happens to be a decent human being, and he even finds a girlfriend in high school English teacher Ruth (Jessica Henwick). But his other relatives are truly odious people, and then there’s Julia, a woman who shows up from time-to-time to encourage his killing ways for her own benefit. Can Becket find contentment or vast wealth or both?
I went into this movie with decent enough hopes. I like Powell, and the rest of the cast is impressive. I wasn’t expecting the Uncle Warren character to be the way he was as the movie goes out of its way to make him into the rarest of the rares in this movie’s setting, a rich man who cares more about doing right by others than his own personal profit. There’s the way that Julia, who clearly wants to sink her claws into the Redfellow estate, and Ruth, who neither knows about it nor cares that much for money, is there to set up the obvious point of comparison about the life Becket wants to live or the one that might actually make him happy. The movie ends in a way that makes the decision over which of those two routes Becket will take, and while it wasn’t that surprising, it also didn’t feel that earned due to the way the movie played out before then.
That, in essence, is where this movie goes wrong. The tone just doesn’t seem to work. There’s a moment early on showing what happened to Becket’s father that could have been a good moment in dark comedy, but the movie as a whole doesn’t quite commit to that tone. That may have been due to the way the movie was trying to make Becket a more normal or likable guy, a man who we won’t vilify because his victims are all rather odious and his methods of killing are all rather mild. This isn’t, say, The Monkey, where the killings are all graphically over-the-top, and if this movie is truly going for the darkly comedic tone, then that might have been a better way to go. Instead, it’s a movie where the story doesn’t go as dark in its comedy, and as a result, this isn’t what I think the movie needed to be to tell the story it wanted to tell.
Grade: C
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