Another Mansion, Another Murder: “How to Make a Killing” Is Slick, Soulless and Exhausting!!!
There’s a certain wicked promise in a movie that opens with its antihero in a prison cell, hours from execution, confessing his sins to a priest. It suggests reckoning, moral clarity, or at the very least, someone will pay. That’s how “How to Make a Killing” begins with our main character coolly narrating. Unfortunately, everything is unraveled before the audience and all that is gained is the knowledge that the rich stay rich, no one learns a lesson, and no one is punished.
Directed by John Patton Ford, the filmmaker behind “Emily the Criminal,” the film positions itself as a dark comedy about greed, inheritance and the moral rot of the ultra-rich. Becket, played by Glen Powell, is the disowned grandson of a multi-billion-dollar dynasty. Raised outside the gilded gates of the empire. Cause for his being an outcast? His mother defied her dad by not getting an abortion. This plot is kinda played out for me. I’ve seen this straight-to-DVD movie already and it’s not helping me that the fact the plot is juiced up by the fact Becket is killing his way to claim the family fortune he believes is rightfully his.
I guess it’s not totally Ford’s fault. This is a remake of “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” the Ealing Studios classic from 1949. While I doubt many people have sat through the film, I think it’s safe to say its storyline isn’t especially singular any longer. “How to Make a Killing” updates the premise for the modern era of hedge funds, megachurch pastors and generational wealth portfolios, but it didn’t add any moral perspective. Here’s the problem … no one in this movie is remotely decent. Not morally gray. Not tragically flawed. They’re all just awful.
Becket isn’t a desperate outsider scraping by; he’s a handsome, well-dressed opportunist who’s doing just fine without the family fortune. His cousins, played by an ensemble that includes Zach Woods, Topher Grace and Raff Law, are grotesque caricatures of affluence: finance bros, faux-bohemian artists and smirking televangelists. They’re written so broadly that their deaths feel less like checklist items than satire. Even the patriarch, played by Ed Harris, practically sheds entitlement like dead skin.
Then there’s Ruth, played with quiet steadiness by Jessica Henwick, whom the film clearly wants us to see as Becket’s moral alternative. She’s an artist who pivots into teaching, trading a lucrative creative career for something more “authentic.” On paper, she’s grounded, compassionate and unimpressed by dynastic excess. In practice, she’s just as compromised as everyone else. She’s emotionally entangled with Becket while her boyfriend is still very much alive, ready to leap into a new relationship before the old one has ended. The film treats this as romantic inevitability. It plays as opportunism. She abandons a well-paying career in pursuit of moral purity through teaching, but her reasons feel aesthetic rather than principled, authenticity as branding. As someone who works in education, I can’t help but bristle. Teaching isn’t a lifestyle accessory for the spiritually restless; it’s a calling that demands grit, patience and long-term commitment. And yet, she’s still the closest thing the movie has to a conscious. That’s how low the bar is.
The film wants us to revel in Becket’s ingenuity, to chuckle at the absurdity of escalating funerals and to admire the audacity of it all. It operates in the lineage of “Succession” and “Dexter,” stories that invite us to savor the spectacle of wealthy or charismatic monsters behaving badly. But at a certain point, the joke just falls flat.
I’m tired of it. I’m tired of movies about rich people doing terrible things and expecting us to delight in their depravity. I’m tired of being told that as long as the killer is charismatic enough, we should root for him. I’m tired of the cinematic thesis that charm is a moral solvent. Powell is undeniably magnetic. He projects intelligence and breezy self-awareness that makes even the ugliest behavior go down smoothly. The film understands that if you put murder behind a perfect smile and a tailored suit, audiences will lean in instead of recoil.
There are glimmers of something sharper beneath the gloss. Bill Camp, as the one uncle who offers Becket genuine mentorship, injects a flicker of humanity into the proceedings. For a moment, the movie seems ready to ask a real question: Why is wealth worth this? What do you actually gain when you’ve sacrificed everything?
But each time the story approaches something resembling insight, it pivots back to irony. Back to the smirk. No one learns anything. Even the choice to begin with Becket awaiting execution, an attempt at moral framing is ultimately hollow. We know he’s caught. We know there’s a consequence. But the journey there is so enamored with his cunning that the punishment feels like a technicality rather than a reckoning. The FBI’s pursuit is perfunctory. The tension is muted. In 1949, “Kind Hearts and Coronets” felt transgressive. In 2026, watching another parade of wealthy narcissists devour each other feels less like satire and more like background noise. Seeing generational wealth turned into a designer-clad farce isn’t cathartic. It’s exhausting.
“How to Make a Killing” is polished, confident and intermittently entertaining, and spiritually empty. Yes, Becket is terrible. So is everyone else. They lie, cheat, manipulate, exploit and kill, and the movie treats it all as a wry amusement. I don’t need my crime films to be sermons. But I do need a reason to care. Here, I cared only in the abstract. Another mansion. Another trust fund. Another corpse in a tailored suit. At a certain point, watching rich people behave monstrously and calling it satire stops feeling daring. 4/10
