Ed Harris has been identified as Whitelaw in How to Make a Killing, the family patriarch at the center of a bitter inheritance fight built around a fortune of more than $20 billion. In the dark comedy-thriller, that role sits inside the film’s main pressure point: who gets the money, and who is willing to kill to stay in line for it.
That matters now because the film has been reviewed as an enjoyable update of Kind Hearts and Coronets, itself adapted from Roy Horniman’s 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal. John Patton Ford moves the story into a modern setting, with Becket Redford at the center and Glen Powell playing him as a killer the audience is meant to follow even as the body count rises.
Becket is on death’s row hours before his execution when Father Morris visits his cell to hear a final confession, and that frame gives the story its sharpest edge. He says his life has been about power and wealth and doing whatever he had to do, while the script keeps asking the viewer to accept a man whose first murder is treated as if nobody really gets hurt, even though he is now waiting to die for it.
The inheritance trail runs through Mary, who was disowned by Whitelaw but kept her baby anyway, leaving Becket and his mother still in line for the fortune once the other heirs were gone. Young Becket later tells Julia Steinway about the money at school, then kills one cousin, Taylor, after Taylor’s father Warren welcomes him into the broker business; Noah, an obnoxious artist, is next, with Ruth beside him. The setup makes the killings feel both absurd and calculating, which is exactly where the film wants to sit.
What remains unresolved is not the money itself but how far the film can stretch that setup before the audience turns on Becket for good. Powell has already shown in Hit Man that he can play a charming killer people root for, and this film leans on that same skill while putting Ed Harris’s Whitelaw at the center of a fortune that keeps the whole story moving.
