‘HOW TO MAKE A KILLING’ Is Slick Nihilism That Never Quite Gels

After being cast out from his billionaire family for the sin of being born from a working class father, average joe Beckett Redfellow (Glen Powell) decides the only logical solution is to murder his entire clan and reclaim the inheritance denied to him. Writer-director John Patton Ford, following up his auspicious Aubrey Plaza starring debut Emily the Criminal, fails to recapture that film’s scrappy, pedestrian angst. While his first film understood the slow moral erosion of someone trying to survive in a culture that worships status and money above all else, How to Make a Killing is a slick, nihilistic crime caper that is easy enough to watch but has almost nothing going on beneath its lacquered surface. It feels less like a director building on his foundation and more like one spinning his wheels in expensive tires.

Having been raised outside the cozy nest of wealth, Beckett works in an upscale designer suit store, an irony, as it is he who is the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Determined to get what’s his, Beckett weaponizes his lineage to infiltrate the Redfellow family and eliminate them one by one. He begins with the youngest, a shmucky day trader, and works his way up, devising increasingly elaborate schemes to insinuate himself into his will-be victim’s lives before casting them off their mortal coils, each death nudging him closer to a net worth in the tens of billions.

We know from the outset that the plan has failed. When we first meet Beckett, he is on death row, hours away from execution. The framing device has him confessing his story to a priest as the clock ticks down. Much of the film unfolds in voiceover, a device often deployed as a substitute for sharper screenwriting (though not always). Here, unfortunately, it feels like exactly that. Despite the supposed twists and turns, everything plays as contrived rather than cunning, simple rather than sinister. The film wants to feel labyrinthine, but it plays like a trust fund idea on a very familiar glide path.

On paper, the ensemble is stacked. Bill Camp shows up as the penitent uncle hoping to make amends by belatedly embracing Beckett and giving him a new path in life in his investment firm; Zach Woods plays a self-serious “modern artist” born in 1991, a detail that strains credulity; Topher Grace is a coiffed megachurch pastor complete with guitar solo riffs who feels imported directly from The Righteous Gemstones; Ed Harris plays the family patriarch, stern and cold in a clinical, overcooked way; and Margaret Qualley appears as Beckett’s childhood crush, having evolved into a conniving socialite with her own grotesque ambitions.

The cast is entirely fine – competent and amusing in flashes – but no one feels like they are digging particularly deep. Powell continues refining his slick, charming operator persona, and he is undeniably entertaining. Still, there is a creeping sense that he is circling a single gear in this film and others. He is well cast here because the surface sheen of his performance mirrors the film’s own failure to dig deeper. Which may be thematically appropriate but doesn’t necessarily make for especially dynamic viewing.

The film from Ford clearly wants to function as a psycho-satirical riff on morality – or the absence of it – in a capitalistic society that values wealth above all else. It so badly wants to be American Psycho, but it lacks the bite and the commitment that made that film an enduring satire on consumption and power. Where Mary Harron’s film fearlessly balanced vicious dark humor with genuinely unsettling depravity, How to Make a Killing pulls its punches. The violence feels procedural and detached from reality. So too does Ford’s film never truly wrestles with the conscience of its characters, particularly Beckett. He is never morally conflicted about killing his family members. Nor does his counterpart Julia (Qualley) seem to have a shred of decency. They are merely vacuous, grasping maws that exist only to consume. But to what end?

Vacuity may be the point, but it does not necessarily translate to complexity or tension. A parade of hollow people circling money can only sustain interest for so long. The parable about the corrosive power of wealth is laid out plainly but Ford isn’t necessarily adding anything interesting to the table with his take on the well-worn theme. The film wants to be smart and stylish (and it’s certainly more the later than the former), laced with dark humor, while also issuing a warning about greed and moral decay. But the warning never quite lands because it feels unexamined and untethered from anything resembling human characters.

How to Make a Killing will likely play well on any given streaming service, but it feels like a movie that welcomes a second-screen experience because it does not have the depth to sustain attention without some external distraction. It’s slick. It’s polished. It’s entertaining in spurts. But it’s also ultimately pretty forgettable and thematically empty. And that is where the irony curdles. For a film intent on exposing the rot at the center of extreme wealth, How to Make a Killing ends up embodying that same hollowness. It critiques vacuity while operating on a purely aesthetic surface. It gestures toward moral decay without ever interrogating it. In aiming to satirize a world built on emptiness, it becomes another glossy artifact of just that. Now that’s rich.

CONCLUSION: John Patton Ford’s ‘How to Make a Killing’ is a stylish, propulsive crime caper about a man murdering his way toward a faster inheritance, but its inability to cut beneath the surface of its characters or the gilded world they inhabit leaves it feeling as vacuous as the ultra-wealthy figures it aims to lampoon.