Glen Powell stars as Becket Redfellow in How To Make A Killing, a black-comedy crime caper that opens with its protagonist on death row and then rewinds to the events that landed him there. The film leans on star charisma, dark humour and a reimagining of a classic tale of inheritance and murder to challenge viewers’ sympathies.
Glen Powell’s Turn As Becket Redfellow
Powell plays Becket Redfellow, once the heir to a multibillion-dollar fortune who begins the movie on death row four hours from execution and recounts his story to a priest. The backstory presented shows Becket disowned after his mother refuses to abort him; she and her son move to Belleville, New Jersey, to a life marked by mediocrity. A chance reunion with childhood acquaintance Julia — played by Margaret Qualley — sets Becket on a calculated path to eliminate the relatives ahead of him in the family succession.
The role is framed explicitly as a challenge for the actor: Powell has said the script was “compelling, ” and described the film as an opportunity to guide an audience toward rooting for a character who descends into violence. He has characterised the project as a tonal hybrid, noting that he hadn’t seen a film quite like it and likening the concept to an “Ocean’s Eleven with murder. ” That framing is central to the film’s gambit — make the protagonist charismatic enough that viewers will follow him down morally fraught terrain.
Tone, Influences and Key Set-Pieces
Writer-director John Patton Ford builds the picture as a loose reimagining of a classic inheritance revenge story, giving it broader locations, a larger cast and a rock‑and‑roll swagger. The film trades in black comedy and tidy pacing as Becket dispatches estranged relatives, with reviewers noting that the leads’ chemistry and dry humour keep the proceedings entertaining.
Several set-pieces are highlighted as particularly striking: a boat-based offing of a brash character named Taylor and a dark-room death involving a hipster photographer called Noah. Those sequences are described as brisk and amusing; they play for laughs even as they depict calculated killings. The movie also leans on Powell’s versatility in disguise work, a device he has used in previous projects.
Cast, Creative Team and Critical Balance
The ensemble includes Margaret Qualley as Julia, Ed Harris, Jessica Henwick, Bill Camp, Raff Law and Zach Woods in supporting roles, with a priest in the opening scenes played by Adrian Lukis and Becket’s mother by Nell Williams. Qualley has described her character’s dynamic with Becket as bullying with an undercurrent of sweetness and highlighted the characters’ mutual focus on status and money.
Critical takes captured in early coverage present the film as entertaining but not exceptional. Praise centres on the “megawatt” charisma of the leads and effective pacing; criticism emphasises that the characters and comic-crime beats are familiar and that the overall piece lands as “decent rather than outstanding. ” The review context also notes an appetite for something more audacious — a single performer inhabiting multiple roles in the more extreme manner of the older template — which this film does not attempt.
For viewers and industry watchers, the central question is execution: can the movie sustain sympathy for a protagonist whose primary plan is to remove relatives from the line of succession? The film’s tonal balance — leaning toward dark humour and slick set-pieces — is designed to answer that by making the journey pleasurable even when the moral calculus is troubling.
How To Make A Killing positions itself as both a crowd-pleasing caper and a study in audience persuasion, hinging on star power and a gleeful approach to crime. The immediate takeaway is that Glen Powell’s charismatic lead performance is the film’s engine; whether that is enough to elevate the picture beyond its familiar beats is left to individual viewers to judge.
