All things considered, How to Make a Killing isn’t an awful film – just a mediocre and uninspired one. However, it’s depressing to know that there will be audiences who will gleefully consume it while not giving so much as a passing glance to Kind Hearts and Coronets on account of it being allegedly “dated”.
One of the greatest British films of all time is the 1949 dark comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets. Razor sharp in wit and utterly scathing in its commentary on the greedy, often inbred, nature of classism, it is as bleak as any gallows humour comedy. Yet, its charming cast and cheeky sense of style make it utterly absorbing. John Patton Ford’s How to Make a Killing is based on the same source material as Kind Hearts and Coronets, yet it plays like a lesser version of the classic film. Take away the morbid charisma of Kind Hearts and Coronets and How to Make a Killing is the drab, dropping mess that you’re stuck with.
Like its 1949 counterpart, How to Make a Killing opens with a man awaiting execution. Set in the modern day rather than 1900, Beckett Redfellow (Glen Powell) asks for a priest to hear his last confession. The narrative is then told in flashbacks: Beckett’s mother, Mary (Nell Williams), was exiled from the wealthy Redfellow estate after she got pregnant with him. Mary later dies from an illness, but she has nonetheless spent years telling Beckett that her family fortune could, in theory, still pass to him if he became next in line. Roused by the prospect of absurd riches, Beckett forms a plan: he will murder the seven members of the Redfellow family that precede him as claimants to the fortune.
One by one, Beckett enacts his scheme, each crime as barbaric as the last. Yet the more kills he makes, the more he starts to wrestle with his own conscience. Particularly once he enters a stable relationship with Ruth (Jessica Henwick), Beckett finds himself torn between a life of contentment and the wealth he’s wanted for so long.
John Patton Ford’s previous film, Emily the Criminal, also wrestled with moral ambiguity. However, what made Emily the Criminal work was its realist approach to its anti-heroine and her predicament. It made her sympathetic without downplaying the roughness of her environment, showcasing the full weight of being caught between a rock and a hard place. In contrast, How to Make a Killing is flashy, colourful and utterly timid in its portrayal of both dark humour and moral questionability. It’s stylishly filmed, and Glen Powell’s natural charisma as an actor does carry it some distance, but only so far. Too meek to be a dark drama and too self-conscious to lean into full bleak comedy, the film ends up awkwardly fence-sitting, removing all of the edge that made the original story so morbidly engrossing. It’s Kind Hearts and Coronets sanitised for a Hollywood audience.
That loss of pointed satire is felt throughout, even as the film makes otherwise provocative points about upper-class greed and entitlement. The translation doesn’t work as well, seeing as the original mocked the British class system, and this is as American as cornbread. Yet, the film nonetheless showcases how the dream of wielding fortune can corrupt people. The set pieces and costume designs of the wealthy characters are lavish yet tinged with an edge of absurdity, indirectly highlighting the high price of dignity and character in mass finery. It’s a potently felt observation in this age of gargantuan wealth inequality, but without that commitment to bleakness, the commentary feels hollow.
Kind Hearts and Coronets, while equally suave in execution, was also vehemently critical of upper-class greed and hoarding – to the point of having Alec Guinness play multiple members of the rich family. However, its bite came from the fact that its protagonist was equally awful – a scumbag killing scumbags in service to a shallow goal. How to Make a Killing, ironically, reins in much of Beckett’s darker tendencies. His first killing is clumsy and half-assed, his commitment to wealth fluctuating between absolute and shaky throughout. This leaves the more comedic dimensions of his later antics feeling tonally out of place, and the observations on morality and the pursuit of riches feeling limp.
Powell is more than capable of comedy – look no further than Hit Man – but he’s left floundering for the punchline as the picture, like its anti-hero, proves unwilling to commit to the bleakness of the material. Neither the characters nor the narrative are pushed into the realms of darkness enough to give the themes that necessary edge. Even Margaret Qualley’s Julia, who serves as an overarching antagonist, feels reined in to make her less detestable.
A golden opportunity to explore the pull of avarice arises when Beckett meets Ruth, played by the underrated Jessica Henwick with humanist conviction. Suddenly given a life that feels complete, the film presents a crossroads scenario in which Beckett has enough to live comfortably, yet still desires the family fortune. This is, of course, all dictated to us via voiceover narration, which leaves the narrative feeling on autopilot, its themes spelt out rather than dissected, once again smoothing out the rough edges to fatal results. When the resolution finally occurs, it feels less like a man being forced to lie in a bed he’s made and more like an uncomfortable happy ending. Even the contemporary setup of speaking to a priest to share the overall narrative doesn’t really work.
In the 1949 version, the anti-hero is instead writing memoirs, keeping his inner monologue to himself, thus setting up a brilliant punchline for the final scene. Confessing to the priest here, as in the revised American setting or the more colourful presentation, serves merely as a modern replication of a previous model, thereby cheapening the earlier innovation. The vivid mise-en-scene lends some element of vogueness to the picture. Still, all the venomous substance is traded in for sterilised characterisations and a hollowed-out narrative that fails to do anything humorous or darkly captivating with its otherwise timely themes.
All things considered, How to Make a Killing isn’t an awful film – just a mediocre and uninspired one. However, it’s depressing to know that there will be audiences who will gleefully consume it while not giving so much as a passing glance to Kind Hearts and Coronets on account of it being allegedly “dated”. Just because a film is in black and white doesn’t mean there’s no contemporary value to be found. If anything, the masses would be more literate and intelligent if they indulged in an older black and white movie every once in a while.
How to Make a Killing is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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