How to Make a Killing Review: Greedy for Revenge

When Glen Powell donned a murderers’ row of faces for Hit Man, the first point of comparison was the beautifully twisted classic British black comedy, Kind Hearts and Coronets. In it, Alec Guinness played eight members of a British aristocratic family, all of whom were assassinated by a disowned twig on the family tree. It wasn’t just that Powell played so many distinctive and hilarious characters, it was that he showed Guinness’ gift for physical performance, to transform not just demeanor and mannerisms but his entire shape.

There was even a little joke at the time that it was a shame that Powell had played that quick-change trick for Hit Man rather than saving it for a remake of Kind Hearts. Apparently, he heard that advice and ignored it with How to Make a Killing. It’s a fresh adaptation of Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal, the 1907 social satire by Roy Horniman that Robert Hamer and John Dighton first adapted for Kind Hearts. Like its bloodline kin, it’s a perfectly scathing glance at power, money, and how the love of both can curdle the soul.

However, unlike either the Ealing comedy or the more recent Broadway version, 2013’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, writer/director John Patton Ford abandons the setting of Edwardian England for contemporary New York. That’s where Becket Redfellow (Powell) works. After all, there’s no way he can afford to live in Manhattan. That takes the kind of money that the rest of his family can afford, not the bastard scion whose mother was ejected from the Redfellow legacy and accounts for the sin of falling in love with one of the poor. So now poor Becket is surviving by selling bespoke suits – suits that, if the world was the way he knows it should be, he could afford. And since all that stands between him and the whole Redfellow estate is a little creativity, a little murder, and applying all those survival skills that growing up working-class has taught him, well, isn’t he just righting a wrong?

Ford showed a knack for putting charismatic stars in morally queasy situations with 2022’s Emily the Criminal, but How to Make a Killing is a more classically structured revenge comedy while just as contemporary as his debut. There’s a chilling savagery to Ford’s look at class in the USA – a subject about which Americans are in less and less denial. Where Horniman’s target was the seeming immutability of the English nobility, Ford reminds us of the American aristocracy, protected not by title but by intergenerational wealth. However, he’s not on a simply structured tirade against the 1%. It’s easy to grin when Becket dispatches Topher Grace as the family scumbag televangelist and yearn for him to finally face off with the shadow-shrouded paterfamilias, played with requisite malice by Ed Harris. But it’s harder to root for the death of Bill Camp as Becket’s uncle who bears all the regrets that should be shared across his shameless, cruel, and greedy family.

Powell may not get to play fancy dress like Guinness did, but he shows that same incredible skill for physical nuance. His real genius here isn’t in how Becket disguises his true nature – from the family, from his girlfriend, Ruth (Jessica Henwick) – but in navigating Becket’s discovery of who he really is. It’s only his childhood crush, Julia Steinway (Margaret Qualley, going full femme fatale as she comes at the part legs first), who knows what he’s capable of. The chilling question that gives How to Make a Killing its delicious and unnerving frisson is how much of a Redfellow Becket really is.

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This article appears in February 20 • 2026.