Glen Powell as Becket Redfellow in How to Make a Killing
(15, 105 mins, in UK and Irish cinemas now)
It would seem an act of sheer American folly: to set about remaking a revered British classic like Kind Hearts and Coronets, the 1949 Ealing comedy in which Dennis Price starred as Louis D'Ascoyne Mazzini, an outcast aristo murdering his way to the top of the family tree, and Alec Guinness was virtuosic as all eight of the unfortunate D’Ascoyne relatives. Then again, one must never underestimate an upstart with ideas above his station.
In this new film, How to Make a Killing, writer-director John Patton Ford (Emily the Criminal), transposes the action to the present-day US, where man-of-the-moment Glen Powell plays Becket Redfellow, the orphaned son of an estranged heiress in the wealthy Redfellow family, who sets about securing the lifestyle to which he believes he’s entitled. Because what has the world come to when even square-jawed, clubbable white guys can’t access wealth and power?
There’s no equivalent here of Guinness’s multi-role extravaganza. Instead we get to enjoy the various pleasures of some top-tier character actors – Ed Harris, Bill Camp, Zach Woods – playing relatives about to meet a bad end. And if you’re wondering why the one on the yacht – Taylor Exeter Redfellow – is serving “Jude Law in The Talented Mr Ripley” quite so insistently, that’s because, in a neat bit of nepo-casting, he’s played by Raff Law, Jude’s son.
The casting of Powell is the film’s real masterstroke, investing relevance and meaning into what might have otherwise been another redundant remake
Each cousin represents one of the great grifts of contemporary American life. There’s the media-savvy megachurch, the hard-partying high-finance bros and the apolitical Manhattan arts scene, where pose and provocation stand in for actual principles. Into each of these worlds Powell-as-Becket is able to sail friction-free, with the aid of a quick costume change. This is more than a little reminiscent of Powell’s master-of-disguise breakthrough role in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, but I would wager that’s intentional. Versatility is a quality we only expect in jobbing actors. Proper, old-school movie stars, of the kind Powell clearly aspires to be, are supposed to play the same essential persona over and over again.
Glen Powell as Becket Redfellow in How to Make a Killing
Powell is no Alec Guinness, then. Nor a Dennis Price. He can’t pull off the ice-cold psychopathy or pitch-black comedy of the 1949 film, and the few moments which attempt this soon flounder into sub-Deadpool snark. Still, the casting of Powell is the film’s real masterstroke, investing relevance and meaning into what might have otherwise been another redundant remake. It’s his blandsome everyman quality which makes this an effective update on the satire of the original.
Edwardian England’s class system feels quaint compared with today, where – as the film implicitly reminds us – there’s no such thing as a billionaire without blood on his hands. These guys might not be literally plotting poisonings à la Becket Redfellow (or they might be?), but fortunes of the size currently in vogue are never ethically acquired, and never enough. By contrast, once Becket has attained the relatively modest goals of “nice girlfriend” and “good career”, he finds himself unexpectedly content.
Edwardian England’s class system feels quaint compared to now, where there’s no such thing as a billionaire without blood on his hands
Ford’s 2022 feature debut, Emily the Criminal, starred Aubrey Plaza as a woman who gradually realises – then revels in – her own criminality, but Becket never really breaks bad in this way. He needs some external force, beyond the ironic plot twist of the original, to propel him over the line of the final few murders, and into the film’s denouement. To that end, the femme fatale character has been significantly fleshed out by Margaret Qualley, smartly attired in endless iterations of Chanel bouclé.
‘Attired in endless iterations of Chanel bouclé’: Margaret Qualley in How to Make a Killing
Becket requires this extra narrative oomph because, unlike earlier versions of the character – the half-Jewish Israel Rank in Roy Horniman’s antisemitic-trope-laden 1907 source novel, or the dandified, half-Italian Louis in the postwar Ealing comedy – he was never really on the outside. And yet, in our 21st-century neo-feudal oligarchy, even a Becket cannot bank on the basic requirements of a dignified, happy life. (It bears stating that this earlier system of supposed meritocracy didn’t ever do right by most of us, and while that’s not explicitly addressed, it feels significant that in an almost all-white cast, the two FBI agents are both Black.)
What’s a guy to do? Ford has the freedom to pursue these dubious moralities and bitter ironies to their logical conclusion, a freedom which didn’t exist in Hollywood’s Hays Code era, when films had to show that crime doesn’t pay. He makes the most of it, with an ending so elite it erases any déclassé stumbles in the opening act. After all, it’s not where you start out that really matters. It’s where you end up.
Ellen E Jones is the Nerve’s film critic. A writer and broadcaster, her book Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber) won the Kraszna-Krausz Prize. She co-hosts the BBC’s flagship film and TV programme, Screenshot, with Mark Kermode on BBC Radio 4, and won the Broadcasting Press Guild’s Presenter of The Year, 2025.