How to Make a Killing follows Becket Redfellow (Glen Powell), a man on death row for murder. Before his execution, he confesses everything to Father Morris (Adrian Lukis).
Becket Redfellow is part of the wealthy Redfellow family headed by Whitelaw Redfellow (Ed Harris). His mother was next in line for the inheritance, but she was exiled after getting pregnant at a young age and choosing to keep the baby. Before her death, she made Becket promise to fight for the life he deserves.
After experiencing failure in both his career and love life, an adult Becket remembers his promise to his mother and decides to claim what was, in the first place, his: the Redfellow inheritance. To do that, he needs to eliminate the people ahead of him. Being the youngest, he has to make at least seven kills to become the one and only inheritor of the family’s wealth.
So one by one, Becket devises a plan to get rid of his cousins and uncles in the most organic way possible, from drowning someone to staging an explosion. Everything seems to go fine, and he is even surprised that he keeps getting away with it.
But problems start to appear.
The first is his childhood friend, Julia Steinway (Margaret Qualley). Unlike everyone else, Julia sees through Becket and knows exactly what he is doing. She uses this to blackmail him, leveraging his secrets to get what she wants most from him: money.
Things get far more complicated when he falls in love with a literary teacher named Ruth (Jessica Henwick) and the FBI begins monitoring him.
For sure, Becket knows how to make a killing, but does he know how to get away with murder?
How to Make a Killing is a tricky film, to me. I found it fun and zingy. Glen Powell and Margaret Qualley are appealing, both on the eyes and performance. But after leaving the cinema and trying to recall everything that happened, something felt off.
The premise is genuinely interesting. It sounds clever on paper. The problem is that the film never earns the intelligence it keeps reaching for. Take the scene where Becket mixes chemicals to trigger an “explosive” reaction. It looks scholarly, but nothing in the film establishes that he would know how to do that. He’s a financial advisor by profession! It feels convenient for him to know stuff like this. Hence, it looks fabricated rather than earned, the kind of shortcut a truly smart film would never take.
Then, every time someone dies, the film kind of forgets about it. Of course, we find out that’s not the entire truth, there are people who are actually looking, monitoring, and investigating it. But it’s still too neat, too clean for the most part. At least make the deaths meaningful when they happen. Alter Becket’s world with every kill he makes. Sure, it is created as a dark comedy, and that means the film is more about humoring us than scaring us, but it borrows the aesthetics of crime and intelligence thrillers, which is kind of frustrating when it refuses to do the dirty work those genres require. The result is something that feels safe and inert when it should feel dangerous.
This is where the “Eat the Rich” premise falls apart. The genre only works when we are made to understand the killer’s rage, when we are shown exactly what makes these people worth hating. The victims here are cartoons: a vapid Princeton student, a rude artist, a hypocritical megachurch pastor. The film never builds a real case against them, never exposes the specific, grinding moral failures that would make their deaths feel meaningful. Without that, these are just bodies.
How to Make a Killing is too cute for its own premise. It is polished, witty, and palatable, when the material calls for something dirtier and more unsettling. You get the sense it wants to be liked. But a story about wealth, murder, and class rage should not be aiming for “likable.” It should get under your skin. This one never does, and that is the disappointment, because the potential was always there.
2/5