'How to Make a Killing' review: Glen Powell's the high point of otherwise disappointing film

Partway through "How to Make a Killing," newly minted Wall Street bro Becket Redfellow (Glen Powell) has a date with young woman named Ruth (Jessica Henwick). She’s been chasing wealth and fame in the fashion industry while hanging out with the idle rich, but she has decided she’s over it. Her real calling: schoolteacher.

"The dream is small," she says. "Nobody teaches you how to do that."

It’s a slightly too-deep moment in a movie that often forgets it’s supposed to make us laugh. "How to Make a Killing" casts Powell ("Top Gun: Maverick," "The Running Man") as a member of the Redfellow family who decides to bump off the seven heirs ahead of him in line for a vast fortune. It’s an update of "Kind Hearts and Coronets," the 1949 Ealing Studios comedy widely praised for its subversive humor and the eight roles played by its astounding star, Alec Guinness. The movie comes at a time when the rich have only gotten richer, but instead of sharpening its attack it goes for a mild, genteel tone — a strange choice from writer-director John Patton Ford, whose prickly drama "Emily the Criminal" explored similar themes of financial struggle and greed.

Powell does solid work in his (single) role as Becket, who we first meet conversing with a priest on death row. He relates how his mother (Nell Williams, brief but moving) chose exile from the family’s Huntington estate (played by a number of North Shore mansions) rather than abort her out-of-wedlock baby. Penniless and on her deathbed, she commands young Becket to live "the right kind of life" — cryptic words that puzzle him for years. He has a light-bulb moment, though, after bumping into a childhood sweetheart, the well-born Julia Steinway (a saucy Margaret Qualley), who jokingly says of his family, "Call me when you’ve killed them all."

So begins what could have been a bloody farce with a class-conscious streak but instead unfolds like a simplistic crime procedural. There’s little buildup to Becket’s crimes — he just pops up at the perfect moment, often with a bit of poison — and then we cut to the funeral. A few characters are modernized (Topher Grace plays the megachurch pastor Steven Redfellow, Zach Woods is the trustafarian artist Noah) but they don’t land any satirical blows. Ed Harris is typecast as the patriarch Whitelaw, one of those crusty old billionaires who loves to hunt.

In the original film, Guinness’ serial assassin kills a suffragist (also Guinness) by shooting down her hot-air balloon — exactly the kind of absurd and slightly tasteless shocker this movie needs. If anything, writer-director Ford may be thinking too subtly for what's supposed to be an R-rated comedy. In another of the film’s memorable but not-exactly-hilarious lines, Whitelaw tells Becket to find someone to love. "At the end of the day," he says, "it’s the only job that pays."

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com