'How to Make a Killing' Review: Glen Powell's Lethal Entitlement

The smile Glen Powell wears through much of How to Make a Killing is meant to charm; instead it deadens. Corpses abound in this cheerily cynical comedy about a man who, rather than settling into an ordinary life, tries to join the top 1 percent by offing his estranged billionaire brood, a premise the film acknowledges is “loosely inspired” by the 1950 British picture Kind Hearts and Coronets.

That earlier film, based on Roy Horniman’s 1907 novel Israel Rank, is a biting black comedy in which Alec Guinness plays all eight members of a wealthy family whose deaths the antihero coolly narrates. How to Make a Killing retains enough of that original story to keep you watching, but it feels like a curiously toothless American take rather than a sharp reimagining.

John Patton Ford, who wrote and directed, frames the tale with Glen Powell’s Becket Redfellow in a prison cell on the eve of his execution, recounting his past to a priest amid flashbacks and voice-over.

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