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Glen Powell stars, with Margaret Qualley and Ed Harris. 

After Emily the Criminal, my expectations for writer/director John Patton Ford’s sophomore feature were raised.

His debut featured Aubrey Plaza as a believably beleaguered protagonist who pushed into illegal activity out of desperation. The titular character was brusque and, though not exactly likable, all her actions felt authentic, engendering empathy for her plight. 

Again sticking with a protagonist from a working-class environment, How to Make a Killing proposes that Becket Redfellow (Glen Powell) believe that he is an heir to the storied $40 billion Redfellow family fortune. His mother’s decision to bear a child out of wedlock prompted her disinheritance from the wealthy family — though it’s never clearly exactly why bearing a child out of wedlock in 1993 would cause any sort of social storm or dishonor upon an incredibly wealthy family — and doomed poor Becket to a life of grumbling and jealousy. 

His dear sainted mother dies, far too young, counseling her son to ‘reach out for a better life,’ and so he seizes upon this phrase as his life’s goal, though what exactly ‘a better life’ or ‘the life you deserve’ actually means for him or why that should be his goal in life is never examined; it’s just assumed that in Becket’s world, all the poor people are not worthy and all the rich people are certainly rotten to the core, especially his relatives, and especially the ones who stand between him and what he considers to be his rightful place as the sole heir to the family’s billions. So he sets out to kill them all. 

From the film’s telling, the idea is planted by a casual goodbye uttered by his childhood sweetheart, who is now the elegantly-coiffed Margaret Qualley. One day, she happens by the men’s clothing store where Becket is toiling away, and his eyes light up at the sight of her. She is engaged, however, to marry one of their school chums, so she moves on, but Becket does not, and soon he is plotting who and how to kill a Redfellow heir. 

The heirs are also entirely a sorry lot of refuge, including foppish-looking and foolishly-acting Topher Grace and Zach Woods, and so they’re easy to kill, except for Bill Camp, who expresses regret when he learns Becket’s identify as a Redfellow cousin and gives him a job on Wall Street. And along Becket’s murderous path, he stumbles upon a true gem, Jessica Henwick, who is not interested at all in Becket’s possible inheritance and somehow falls for him as an individual. 

Despite these glimmers of human interaction, Becket remains grimly determined to carry out his trail of execution, occasionally coming across Margaret Qualley, who keeps crossing Becket’s path as her own fortunes dwindle. 

Glum and dreary, How to Make a Killing feels like a movie with a comic premise — at least two fellow critics mentioned the similarity in plot to the Alec Guinness dark comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) — that is directed by John Patton Ford like a modern noir, complete with cinematography by Todd Banhazl (Hustlers, 2019) that cloaks even daytime scenes in patchy shadows. Rather than the sprightliness associated with dark comedies, the film is sluggish in pacing, and further burdened with a voiceover narration by Becket as he explains the plot to a priest who’s been called to Becket’s prison cell. 

The film wants to be naughty or to upend expectations or to tell a different sort of morality play or to do something out of the ordinary. Indeed, I was primed to enjoy a twisted, dark comedy. Yet the laughs are few and far between, and the comic tone is scattered amidst the heavy-handed plot exposition and Glenn Powell’s generally charmless performance, which is equally heavy-handed. 

All this is, evidently, intentional on the part of writer/director John Patton Ford. Perhaps the root issue lies with making the lead character a good-looking introvert, who keeps attracting people with his handsome appearance, rather than his persuasive arguments or clever behavior or romantic gestures. 

In any event, How to Make a Killing falls disappointingly flat for this viewer. 

The film opens Friday, February 20, throughout the Metroplex, via A24 Films.  For more information about the film, visit the official site.