Glen Powell in How to Make a Killing
HOW TO MAKE A KILLING
About 20 minutes into writer/director John Patton Ford's How to Make a Killing, Margaret Qualley shows up in the men's-clothing store at which Glen Powell's protagonist Becket Redfellow works. Playing Julia Steinway, the now-grown-up girl Becket adored in childhood, Qualley, as usual, looks like a zillion bucks, her smile is dazzling, and she's funny, solicitous, and – despite sporting a ginormous wedding ring – even mildly flirty. Yet in Ford's dark comedy thriller, and in a change of pace for the performer, Qualley turns out not to be an on-screen firecracker. She's more like a countdown clock, the type that requires action heroes to cut either the blue or red wire before everything gets blown to bits. In other words, Qualley, here, is beguiling, threatening, and potentially explosive, and while Julia is instrumental in kicking off and escalating the central plot, it's too bad that she's not around more often. How to Make a Killing is watchable and fairly satisfying, but only when its femme fatale is in view does the film deliver the devilishly nasty kick you want from it.
Employing a framing device that reminded me, oddly enough, of Amadeus, the movie opens with Becket, on death row, being visited by a kindly priest (Adrian Lukas). With Becket's execution set four hours hence, Father Morris is ready to hear the man's final confession. But the cleric is surprised to find that Becket isn't at all contrite, or despondent, or scared. Instead, this relaxed charmer with the mile-wide grin is downright jovial, and launches into a feature-length telling of events leading to his incarceration, beginning with his birth. The former heir to billions, Becket's mother Mary (Nell Williams) was disinherited following her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and forced to leave her family's Long Island mansion and raise Becket as a single mom in New Jersey. Mary, however, conditioned her son to believe that, one day, the entire Redfellow fortune would be his, as a technicality kept the child, though out of the family, in the line of succession. (As with numerous HtMaK developments to come, buying this conceit does require some serious suspension of disbelief.)
With the Redfellows refusing to acknowledge Mary or her son even after her early death makes the child an orphan, Becket grew up detesting his absent family, his dreams of future wealth diminishing with each passing day. That's when adult Julia – as wealthy, privileged, and unobtainable as she was in her youth – re-enters Becket's life. After some friendly small talk, she asks him, despite clearly knowing the answer, if that “family fortune” thing ever came to fruition. Nope, he says, although he's still in the running behind a bunch of others. Too bad, she says, adding as an adieu, “Call me when you've killed them all.” The light bulb that shines over Becket's head is blinding.
How to Make a Killing consequently concerns Becket's plan to knock off the seven Redfellows preventing him from his “deserved” riches, and the material has been around for a long time in several iterations. Ford's film is primarily based on the 1907 Roy Horniman novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal. That book, and its main premise, were also adapted into the Tony-winning 2014 Broadway musical A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder. And the credits reveal that HtMaK is also “inspired” by the 1949 British comedy Kind Hearts & Coronets, which famously cast Alec Guinness as all eight family members on the lead's hit list, men and women alike. As Richard Linklater's 2024 Hit Man suggested, Glen Powell, that lover of goofy disguises and exaggerated accents, likely could've pulled off Guinness' feat, too. But he's certainly enjoyable in his more form-fitting role, and with Ford's cast of potential corpses including a feral Ed Harris, the reliably dialed-in Bill Camp, Zach Woods at peak invention, and Topher Grace doing an evangelical take on Tom Cruise's “seduce and destroy” guru from Magnolia, it's hard to wish that the Redfellows were all played by one person.
I did, however, wish that Ford had nailed a clearer, perhaps bleaker sense of tone, starting with the very conception of Becket. Powell is likability incarnate, and that works for him. It mostly works for the film. But for the HtMaK narrative to truly succeed, we have to buy that its genial, mild-mannered suit salesman is so maniacally driven by envy and greed – to say nothing of lust generated by Julia's re-emergence – that he's capable of plotting and executing unthinkable crimes even when the universe itself, it seems, is begging him to stop. Becket's first murder results in him securing a great job on Wall Street, as well as a much-needed father figure. His second leads to him getting a phenomenal girlfriend (the appropriately phenomenal Jessica Henwick) who, unlike Julia, actually does have a lot in common with Becket. Yet despite visits by the FBI and legitimate contentment in his professional and personal lives, the disinherited heir continues with his murderous quest, which would only make sense if we believed that Becket, brainwashed by his mother into expecting the world on a silver platter, was a secret sociopath. We don't, though. With Powell in the part, Becket Redfellow is just a well-meaning, sweet serial killer – thoroughly pleasant, but hardly exciting. (The actor's reluctance, or inability, to wholly explore his characters' darker traits also somewhat hindered last fall's The Running Man.)
The killings themselves also don't have the bite they should. With one significant exception, the Redfellows are universally, intentionally unappealing – that's a comment on the characters, not those playing them – and their deaths aren't designed to affect us. Yet while Ford shoots the first two murders with considerable elegance, there's little slapstick to respond to, nor much in the way of grisliness; basically, we simply view the killings and think, “Hmm.” The eat-the-rich satire is too wishy-washy to register, and Becket sets up and pulls off his crimes with such blasé nonchalance that I honestly didn't know how we were meant to react. With guilty delight that the guy was getting away with it? With escalating unease at the monster Becket was (perhaps unknowingly) becoming? It's all shot with precision and stays diverting enough through the end. But given its gaping plot holes and frequent defiance of logic – how on earth is Becket not arrested long before he finally is?! – HtMaK is also a little humdrum and irritating, and I only really perked up whenever Qualley entered the scene.
Clearly, Ford knows what he's lucked into with this casting inspiration: perhaps the only young 30-something on the planet whom you can readily imagine in any of Barbara Stanwyck's noir roles. Qualley has beauty, intelligence, wit, humor, suggestiveness, a throaty low voice, legs that go all the way down to the floor – she's built for noir. She also gets the film's most well-defined and enticing role, and handles it with a delicate blend of insinuation, friskiness, and unapologetic viciousness that's quite simply a thrill to behold. Although I smiled at much of Ford's movie, practically every shot involving Julia had me on the verge of giggles, and the more intimidating she became, the richer the movie became. How to Make a Killing? Being Margaret Qualley seems like an awfully good start.
I CAN ONLY IMAGINE 2
I initially planned on getting to more new releases over the past few days than the two I caught. But roughly a half-hour after leaving my Thursday-afternoon screening of I Can Only Imagine 2, I got a phone call: My childhood home in Crystal Lake, Illinois, where my parents have lived for the past 61 years, was severely damaged – and, for the next several months, made uninhabitable – by a kitchen fire that quickly spread. With an eternal debt owed to speedy police and fire-department action, my folks made it out alive, thank God, as did their dog and cat. After my rushed, jittery, 160-minute drive to Crystal Lake from Rock Island, the two days that followed are now a fuzzy yet also intensely memorable blur: horror and shock and relief and hasty housing arrangements and texts and calls and e-mails and appreciation and tears and justified (and unjustified) screaming and bottomless thanks for the support of family, friends, and paid professionals who didn't have to be as kind as they were. And every so often, throughout those 48 hours, I thought about the biographical musical drama I watched right before answering that phone call. Specifically, the words spoken by musician Tim Timmons (played by Milo Ventimiglia), who insists that the key to life lies in “the intersection of both our deepest griefs and our deepest gratitudes.” That sentiment holds more resonance for me now.
Hopefully I'll be excused for not offering a completely thorough recounting of my I Can Only Imagine 2 experience, partly because my memories of directors Andrew Erwin's and screenwriter Brent McCorkle's sequel are hazy, and mostly because I can think of few things tackier than employing a family tragedy for the intro to a movie review. (Not that, obviously, I completely restrained myself.) Going forward, ICOI2 will always be “the film I watched the day the house caught fire.” But that's hardly the film's fault, so here are a few things I remember – nearly all of them good things – about this followup to the unanticipated 2018 hit, which I also quite liked.
Returning to the role of Bart Millard, lead vocalist for the contemporary-Christian pop group MercyMe, John Michael Finley is as touching, sincere, and engaging as he was nearly eight years ago, though I wish Millard's understandable melancholy – much of the plot hinging on the Type-1-diabetes diagnosis of his son Sam (the first-rate Sammy Dell) – didn't so routinely deprive us of the performer's spirit-lifting smile. (Finley, a gorgeously voiced baritone who should be getting more screen work, also doesn't sing nearly as much here as he did last time, though he absolutely slays his climactic number “Even If” … which really should've been this sequel's title.) Trace Adkins is again wonderfully gruff and funny as band manager Scott Brickell, while Millard's bandmates – the team here composed of Mark Furze's Nathan Cochran, Ezra Prõch's Robbie Shaffer, Jason Burkey's Mike Scheuchzer, and Aaron Benward's Barry Graul – are granted more face time and personality than before, which is a definite plus. Sophie Skelton, replacing 2018's Madeline Carroll, lends gravitas to the role of Bart's wife Shannon, and there's a nicely low-key sequence involving Dennis Quaid, who was legit scary in ICOI1 and legit endearing now that Bart's recovering-alcoholic dad is seen only in flashback.
But the best reason to see I Can Only Imagine 2, at least if you're not instinctively inclined to seek out an inspirational, faith-based bio-musical, is the aforementioned Ventimiglia, who's utterly fantastic. Right off the bat, what you most notice about the actor's singer/songwriter Tim Timmons is that he's appreciably weird. A little flaky, a lot silly, prone to ironic commentary and snap decisions … . Not at all the figure that the “contemporary-Christian artist” label might lead you to expect. Yet as the film progresses, and we begin to understand how the musician's demeanor is a product of his recent cancer diagnosis – one that doctors presumed was fatal – Timmons' eccentricity begins to look a lot like grace. He's seizing the moment, his tour with MercyMe is the biggest collective moment he's ever had, and Ventimiglia (who sings and plays Timmons' songs, on multiple instruments, beautifully) absolutely exudes the joy, terror, and honor of sharing his faith with anyone who'll listen to his message. To this day, many years after he was expected to pass, father of four Tim Timmons is still performing, and by all evidence, he found it: that intersection between grief and gratitude. Here's hoping we can all find it.
