No Mystery: Film Review of How to Make a Killing
★★1/2
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
The definition of film noir found in the dictionary probably has a picture of Humphrey Bogart smoking a cigarette and holding a revolver next to it. Look up femme fatale and you’ll find a black and white glossy of Barbara Stanwyck or Rita Hayworth posing provocatively in front of a shadowy black and white interior.
Things have changed. Noir has evolved with the times. The new noir (neo-noir for those who love labels) still has the cynical sensibilities, dark themes, and morally questionable situations but the genre is now more colorful, more violent, and more sexually graphic.
Body Heat, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, Blood Simple, Reservoir Dogs, and Blade Runner are prime examples of neo-noir. More recently, films like Love Lies Bleeding, Drive Away Dolls (and its sequel Honey Don’t) Pig, and MaXXXinehave further stretched the envelope of this particular genre. In Ethan Coen’s “lesbian B-movie trilogy”, including Drive-Away Dolls and Honey Don’t, he incorporates pulp, ribald humor, and graphic sex to focus on noir through a lesbian point-of-view.
In his X trilogy, including X, Pearl, and MaXXXine, Ti West blends elements of splatter film, pornographic themes, and biddy horror into the noir sensibility. We’ve come a long twisted way since Bogart and Bacall.
John Patton Ford’s new film How to Make a Killing is a black comedy thriller with elements of noir that continues to redefine the neo-noir genre. It also has elements of the “noir light” literary genre which contains classic noir components but does not frame them in as dark an atmosphere as classic noir. For instance, The Big Lebowski is noir light done right.
How to Make a Killing opens with Becket Redfellow (Glenn Powell) awaiting his execution on death row, now hours away. A priest shows up and even though Becket never requested spiritual counsel, he decides to tell the priest the reason for his incarceration.
When she was a young girl, Becket’s mom Mary Redfellow (Nell Williams), heiress of the fabulously rich Redfellow estate, fell in love with a young cello player. When she became pregnant with Becket and refused to abort the child, her family disowned her, forcing her to forgo her inheritance, move to Jersey, and work at the DMV. While not being able to provide the finer things to Beckett, she taught him how to dress, comport himself, and be a gentleman, always telling him someday he would inherit the Redfellow fortune.
Beckett meets the wealthy and haughty Julia Steinway (Margaret Qualley) and is smitten by her, but when his mother dies, he is folded into the foster care system.
Years later, while working a men’s clothing store, Becket runs into Julia who puts the idea of the Redfellow inheritance into his head. All he has to do is get rid of the seven inheritors ahead of him. He starts with his cousin Taylor (Raff Law) a hedonistic irresponsible idiot—the very stereotype of a spoiled rich kid. Becket dispatches his cousin (nearly by accident) and starts moving through the family tree, pruning as he goes. At Taylor’s he meets his father Warren (Bill Camp), who takes a shine to Becket and employs him in the family brokerage firm—which does not deter young Becket from his pursuit of the family fortune. His cousins start dropping like flies. A couple of obligatory FBI agents show up to question Becket, but they are about as threatening as two shivering chihuahuas.
Things are complicated when the newly married Julia reappears in his life, demanding a loan because her husband has lost all his money. When he refuses to give her any money, she threatens to blackmail him with evidence of his crimes. Things get weirder (in a traditional type of black comedy whodunit way), but this movie offers very little in the way of fresh comic ideas or innovative ideas for a thriller narrative.
While this film boasts an outstanding cast, the comic pacing is spotty, the writing is mediocre at best, and the suspense is non-existent. Unlike the Knives Out series which deftly blends comedic elements with social satire and realistic relationships, How to Make a Killing seems more of a shell of a black comedy—a Cliff Notes version—than the real thing. The characters, particular the Redfellow victims, are so stereotypically predictable that it’s difficult to stir up much sympathy for them—and we do need a little. Even the climactic scene between Becket and the Redfellow (Ed Harris) patriarch is a bit of a yawner.
The movie does have its moments, however. The romantic entanglement between Beckett and Ruth (Jessie Henwick) the ex-girlfriend of one of his ex-cousins provides one of the few sparks in them film—mostly because of Henwick’s magnetic presence. There is a definite chemistry between the two that almost outshines the rest of the film.
While Glen Powell is a good actor, he seems as if he’s disinterested in this movie, cruising through it with the same knowing smirk on his face. Unlike Matt Damon’s Ripley or Anthony Hopkins’ Lecter or Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc, Powell isn’t a charming or likable or charismatic anti-hero. He seems to cruise through on a single speed—maybe second gear. I did like his work in The Hit Man, but his nonplussed style of smirky cool doesn’t work here. He’s just sort of there, unlike Margaret Qualley’s Julia Steinway. While watching, I couldn’t help imagining what Jack Nicholson or Daniel Craig or Paul Rudd might have brought to the role.
In her relatively short career, Qualley (perhaps along with Anya Taylor-Joy) has proven to be the ultimate femme fatale of the twenty-first century. Her work in Ethan Coen’s “lesbian B-movie trilogy” films Drive-Away Dolls and Honey Don’t, as well as Kinds of Kindness, and The Substance have shown an iridescent evil aura on her that transcends the screen.
In How to Make a Killing, her performance strikes the perfect balance between the inexorably ruthless scheming of Kathleen Turner in Body Heat and the offbeat sexual coolness and confidence of Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not and the comic timing and self-assurance of Jamie Lee Curtis (minus the zaniness) in A Fish Called Wanda. She is sarcastic with being smarmy and smarter than anyone else in the room. She is irresistible and she is poison—fatale extraordinaire.
In How to Make a Killing, she manages to effortlessly steal every scene she’s in and provides the only modicum of mystery we see in the film. In a number of her scenes, Patton Ford has her posed provocatively with her legs on the table, languorously smoking a cigarette, or lounging on a divan. The set-ups are the ultimate fatale clichés, but Qualley pulls them off with an air of genuineness that does not suffocate the gentle parody.
How to Make a Killing is ultimately a disappointment. Despite some bright spots in Qualley’s performance and Becket’s relationship with Ruth—along with Becket’s dialogue with the priest on death row, this film just sort of lies flat for me—sort of like one of Becket’s corpses.
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