""Inspired by" hardly covers it. How to Make a Killing is a conventional remake, replicating many of its characters and narrative beats, while failing to capture any of its frosty charm - or the trick of having Alec Guinness play eight different characters. Both director and star have shied away from the thrilling moral apathy of the original film's antihero."
"Becket's no Robin Hood - he's a man who kills bad rich people so he himself can become a bad rich person, and the film, in turn, struggles to place him anywhere concrete on the moral spectrum. Was he always a stinker? Or did the pursuit of wealth corrupt him? How to Make a Killing is too timid to either defend his actions or to render him genuinely unlikeable."
How to Make a Killing, directed by John Patton Ford and starring Glen Powell, is presented as inspired by the 1949 Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, but functions as a conventional remake replicating characters and narrative beats. The film follows Becket Redfellow, who commits murders to secure an inheritance. Unlike the original's protagonist, who embodied moral apathy with frosty charm, Becket lacks clear ethical positioning. Ford attempts to inject moral righteousness into the contemporary "eat the rich" narrative, but Becket remains morally ambiguous—neither genuinely likeable nor defensibly villainous. The film struggles to establish whether Becket was inherently corrupt or corrupted by wealth pursuit, leaving his character underdeveloped and the film unable to capture the original's sophisticated moral complexity.
Read at The Independent
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