How To Make a Killing hacks at a familiar family tree — and leaves a body at every branch

to the highest degree latterly, thither was How To vote out Your fellowship, Bella Mackie's bleakly comic novel about a girl who murders her way through her family tree to claim an inheritance. While Mackie hasn't officially said it drew on the same source material, its eerie similarities were close enough to prompt a recently settled lawsuit against Netflix over alleged copyright infringement, clearing the way for a potential future Anya Taylor-Joy version. 

Before that was A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, the 2014 Tony winner for best musical — again a story about a disowned man reclaiming his birthright by killing eight senior members of his family. 

And before that is, ostensibly, the true source of John Patton Ford's new Glen Powell-led How To Make a Killing — about a man killing the estranged relatives who stand between him and a payday. According to promotional material, that film is based on the 1949 black comedy classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, itself adapted from an even earlier novel.

That a single story would inspire so many adaptations isn't unusual. For the literarily inclined, it may even leave a sour taste — especially after Emerald Fennell’s recent insult to the novel Wuthering Heights. But when you look back to the strange, nearly forgotten — and not uncontroversial — urtext all this darkly comic familicide, Ford has a couple things going for him. 

First, the changes in this version actually sharpen its points about amoral ambition and the impossibility of meritocracy in a rigid social hierarchy. Ford's alterations don't just update a narrative that was ahead of its time — in some ways, they strengthen its message, as did many of the adaptations that followed.

The laundry hamper of confused versions that litter the past all tweak the original — especially the ending — for a more clarified end result. With what may be the best ending yet, and with star Glen Powell's impressive comedic chops, How To Make a Killing at least doesn't sink far below the other variations on the theme. 

Second is the reason these other iterations decided to tweak the story at all. It's sometimes said you can only make a good adaptation from a bad novel — and that a good novel only yields bad adaptations. That rule could be being proven here because the somewhat bizarre source material How To Make a Killing is based on is hardly terrible, but it's also not an inviolable classic of western literature.

Instead, 1907's Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal — nearly lost to history and variously described as anti-Semitic and anti-anti-Semitic — already needed reworking. In its original form, the story follows a half-Jewish man and includes allusions to everything from "blood libel" to the various "instincts of [his] race." Today, Israel Rank is often read as a satire on racist assumptions rather than an example of it. 

But the story's many alterations over the years have helped sharpen its takedown of aristocracy and, more importantly, connect it to the audience of its time. Knowing what to change to keep the theme intact while saying something current is what makes adaptations — and this one in particular — feel worth watching. 

This time, we do get a familiar version of the story: Glen Powell plays Becket Redfellow, a young man disowned by his obscenely rich family because of his mother's "unacceptable" relationship with a low-income musician.

As in other iterations, Becket — resentful of the poverty he's forced to live in while his still-living relatives enjoy opulent wealth — employs comically complicated ploys to eliminate them one by one for the inheritance, tearing through the line of succession like a Wile E. Coyote take on Great Expectations. 

And like other adaptations, when we meet Becket, his plan has already gone sour: he's sitting on death row with hours to go before his execution. The rest of the plot plays out as his memoir — a recounting of how his schemes landed him in this predicament.

But instead of Kind Heart and Coronets' conceit of having one actor play all the doomed victims, How To Make a Killing offers a full marquee: Ed Harris as maniacal patriarch Whitelaw Redfellow, Topher Grace as mendacious megachurch pastor Steven J. Redfellow and Zach Woods as manic art photographer Noah Redfellow. 

Then there is Noah's sweet, unsuspecting girlfriend, Ruth (Jessica Henwick), and of course Becket's paramour Julia Steinway (played with incredible levels of camp by Margaret Qualley). And while it lacks the built-in joke of a seemingly endless bounty of same-faced relatives popping up like groundhogs, these supporting turns give How To Make a Killing much of its charm.

Grace's cameo is wonderfully unhinged, while Woods has seemingly perfected playing the guy you love to hate. But Qualley is the true star: stepping into shoes once filled by the the inimitable Joan Greenwood, she positively chews the scenery as a larger-than-life, old-school femme fatale. 

Not everything works, though. An overreliance on zany comedy leads to a late-stage action sequence that feels tonally confused. And for all his focus-grouped leading-man charm, Powell is perhaps the least interesting character on offer; his sunny everyman affect does little to make the plot's bitter economic ladder-climbing hit home.

But the change of setting alone gives Ford an edge: By shifting from Kind Hearts' Edwardian England to a distinctly American story of self-advancement despite humble beginnings, the whole affair takes on a whiff of The Wolf of Wall Street. 

Better still is how Ford rewrites the ending — a rite of passage for every adaptation of Israel Rank. Earlier versions have tried to balance our desire to see the protagonist succeed with the punishment he deserves for clearly horrifying acts; the American release of Kind Hearts even added an extended ending to satisfy censors worried about glorifying crime. 

Interestingly, How To Make a Killing subvert both expectations. In a smart riff on the ruthlessness at the heart of hustle culture — and the hollowness of its rewards — Ford's bleak takeaway lands as both refreshing and entertaining. 

Despite the reactions, this isn't a story about eating the rich or the indomitability of the human spirit. It's an intentionally dour examination of how impossible personal advancement can be in the face of enormous, intractable wealth gaps — an update on the old British belief in the inherent worth of the aristocratic class, reinvented as a takedown of the American Dream itself.

Though it's dressed up as a movie about down-and-out Americans pulling themselves out of poverty solely on the strength of their own bootstraps, its bleak hopelessness isn't a bug — it's the point.

Which may not make How To Make a Killing better than everything that came before it, but it still makes it worth the effort. 

Senior Writer

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