In How to Make a Killing, Glen Powell plays a man who just hasn’t been dealt any luck in his life: he’s incredibly good looking, has a high-earning career, and has two knockout women swooning over him. Oh, and if he kills off several of his relatives, he’ll inherit $28 billion.
A semi-entertaining crime-thriller that verges on dark comedy but never quite gets there, How to Make a Killing goes through the motions of routine sociopathic murder while also presenting its protagonist Becket as an empathetic leading man. Powell brings the charm and the wicked smile, hooks a love interest (Jessica Henwick), and fends off a femme fatale (Margaret Qualley), but something about the affair feels as empty as Becket’s soul.
Director John Patton Ford (Emily the Criminal) never quite achieves the energy and casual menace you’d expect from a premise such as this. It doesn’t have to be funny (it isn’t), but a movie about a man offing his relatives one by one shouldn’t take itself too seriously–and How to Make a Killing almost does. There’s some swagger to be found in a story like this, yet Ford latches onto very little of it. Where you’d expect edge, there isn’t; where Ford should relish in the killing of his on-screen victims, he simply doesn’t.
Ultimately, How to Make a Killing simply falls a tad flat, even if Powell’s easy charisma carries things for a while. It’s a shame, because Ford truly does have a great premise on his hands; it just feels like he didn’t know which kind of movie to make. A dark comedy? A twisty crime noir? Something else entirely? It’s sadly none of those things even though it has elements of all of them.
How to Make a Killing isn’t the worst way to spend two hours, though the freezing cold AMC theater I suffered in didn’t make it the most pleasurable, either. But there’s a better movie here that was never made, and for that it’s best to do your killing somewhere else.
Review by Erik Samdahl. Erik is a marketing and technology executive by day, avid movie lover by night. He is a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society.