'How to Make a Killing' gives anti-capitalism a bad name

Glen Powell can't save this fatally tame black comedy

This still from “How to Make a Killing” just makes me want to go watch “Hit Man” again. (A24)

In 2022, writer-director John Patton Ford made a nifty thriller called “Emily the Criminal,” in which a recent college grad, deeply in debt, turns to increasingly illegal activities to pay off her student loans. It served as both a taut neo-noir and a caustic critique on late-stage predatory capitalism.

Ford’s new film, “How to Make a Killing,” feels like another song written with the same lyrics as “Emily,” but with a completely different arrangement. Again, the protagonist is pushed for financial reasons into committing crimes. But this time, it’s an arch black comedy that depends on our natural antipathy towards the .1%. It doesn’t work nearly as well, a comedy thriller that’s not very funny and not very thrilling, and in the end doesn’t have nearly as much to say about the income gap in America as it thinks it does.

If the film gets by at all, it’s on the considerable charisma of Glen Powell, playing Becket Redfellow. Becket’s mother (Nell Williams) is ousted from her old-money billionaire family when she becomes pregnant as a teenager, so she raises him on her own in working-class New Jersey.

When she dies young, she urges Becket to pursue the “right kind of life,” which to him means securing the Redfellow family fortune. He’s still in the will, but there are seven relatives between him and that $28 billion once the cruel Redfellow patriarch (Ed Harris) dies. So Becket decides to speed things up a bit and kill off those seven, one by one. (Any similarity to the British comedy “Kind Hearts and Coronets” is entirely intentional.)

How does it go? Well, the opening title card is “Four Hours From Execution,” and the story is told in (rather tedious) voiceover narration in the form of Becket’s jailhouse confession to the prison priest (Adrian Lukis). In flashbacks, we see Becket speed-run through his family tree, each rich relative more awful than the last. (The one exception is a kindly uncle, played by the great character actor Bill Camp, who hires Becket into the family business.)

Zach Woods plays an insufferably pretentious artist who is one of Becket’s first victims. (A24)

The rich victims are so buffoonish and cartoonish that there’s some fun in the broad characterizations, including Zach Woods as a pretentious artist and Topher Grace as a megapastor preacher. But almost as soon as we meet them, Becket offs them. It might have been more satisfying to meet them all at once first, marinate in their awfulness a little, and then watch as Becket goes down the list.

It’s also just so EASY for Becket to kill off these unsuspecting rubes that there’s really no suspense to be had about whether he’ll succeed, at least until he gets to the top of the list. The film also never gets a bead on whether Becket is a closet sociopath enjoying this, or a reluctant assassin pushed by economic circumstance and a promise to his late mother. At one point, Powell asks the priest (and the audience) if they get a “strange thrill” in hearing about his crimes. We don’t, but it doesn’t seem that he does either?

Jessica Henwick is completely underused as the doting girlfriend who doesn’t suspect a thing about Becket, while Margaret Qualley makes the most of an underwritten role as a former childhood friend of Becket’s who becomes the biggest obstacle to his plans.

For a movie about a guy who wants to kill seven people, “How to Make a Killing” is surprisingly genial and tidy, so confident that we hate the ultra-rich so much that it never needs to shock or challenge us. Come on, give us rabble a little credit.

“How to Make a Killing” is now in theaters. In Madison, it’s playing at Marcus Point, Marcus Palace, AMC Fitchburg 18 and Flix Brewhouse Madison.