At The Movies with James Phelan: How to Make a Killing

Everyone enjoys a rags to riches story. Especially I imagine the actual person undertaking that ascending journey from poverty to unimaginable affluence. Well poverty is overstating it for the central character here Becket (Glen Powell) who is getting by in the modern style as the film opens. He is hard working but still struggling to make ends meet in New Jersey suburbia.

Becket has his sights set higher because his dearly departed mother actually came from immense wealth. She was cast out of the elite Redbreast family empire when she became pregnant with Becket. So, the boy grew up on the wrong side of the tracks but his mother continued to nurture the notion that he was entitled to and destined for colossal riches.

That seed of discord took root in Becket and blossoms into action when he unexpectedly and unfairly loses his job. With time on his hands, his thoughts turn murderous with some sly encouragement from an ex-girlfriend, Julia (Margaret Qualley), whose opaque attraction to Becket seems inexorably linked to the family fortune in his background.

As Becket counts up the relatives standing between him and the lucrative easy life, he realises the hefty figure on his kill list is eight souls. The film is at pains to keep Becket sympathetic so naturally the path to avoid him being an outright psychopath is to portray his victims as malignant monsters that the world would be better without.

This works for a while with Becket’s first tentative step towards pruning the family tree reading as almost an accident. This dark humour remains in Becket’s measured and almost slow-paced rampage through his in-laws. (In fairness he is trying not to draw attention to himself!) However, the film gets more complicated and is at its best when Becket’s stealth campaign is complicated by unforeseen emotional entanglements. Like when one of his uncles and potential victims genuinely takes Becket under his wing. And grants his once estranged nephew a career path based on affection rather than qualifications.

Or when the aspiring inheritor falls heavily for the girlfriend of one of his slain cousins.

These pleasing bumps in the road interrupt the general slickness that the film indulges in.

Even with the occasional polite probing of the FBI, Becket’s progress as the family reaper is a little too easy and unopposed. And personally, I thought a bit more thought could have gone into finding some more variety in the killings. It all gets a bit samey with several rival heirs dispatched by poison for instance. The slayings are reduced to pithy superficial montages at a time when even his slowest witted kin would have been upping security and vigilance.

However, the film blazes over its own flaws with its dark hue of humour and the populist vicarious pleasure of seeing the super rich put to the sword.

This sentiment is nothing new when you consider this film is inspired by the 1949 British classic, ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’. In truth I’ll confess to only a passing knowledge of that film. If you want a more modern comparison, think ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ with more murders… The lead of this film Glen Powell is probably at the same commercial crossroads that his ‘Anyone But You’ co-star Sydney Sweeney faced only a few short months ago. Back then, those in the know in Hollywood deemed that she needed a hit. And quick. She duly delivered with ‘The Housemaid’.

Powell is being pushed at us as the next movie icon. Will he be the heir apparent to Hollywood? Well, that all comes down to box office and that is the will of the people. People like you.