Parents' Guide to How to Make a Killing

Deeply cynical and disappointingly disheartening, writer-director John Patton Ford's highly anticipated second film is more Luigi Mangione than Emily the Criminal. Emily offered up sharp social criticism, exposing the brokenness of the American system that pushed its heroine into crime as a desperate attempt to escape from poverty's chokehold. In How to Make a Killing, a young American abandoned by his filthy rich family plots vengeance to seize the fortune he believes he's entitled to—and perhaps, the film suggests, his relatives have it coming. But Ford injects a moral ambiguity into the proceedings that, while apparently meant to spark debate, instead bludgeons viewers' investment: While pursuing his goal, Becket finds love, career success, and estranged relatives reaching for redemption, but he kills anyway. It's not enough, you see—but what is "enough"? That's the film's central question, and it's a good one, but Patton Ford's execution is so clumsy that the provocation lands like a botched hit, leaving behind a grim, demoralizing residue.

The film is practically a scene-for-scene remake of 1949's politely twisted British comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, which featured Alec Guinness pulling octuple duty as the killer and the eight doomed heirs. That movie's dry wit and matter-of-fact approach to murder played like a deliciously improper joke, leaving viewers laughing with a kind of shocked bemusement. Crucially, its ending reassured us that justice was coming, which allows enough moral comfort that we could laugh at the body count. That tonal safety net mattered in 1949's highly mannered postwar moment, a stark contrast to today's cultural climate, which is decidedly darker. At a time when entertainment is knee-high in "eat the rich" fantasies, How to Make a Killing doesn't wink at the impulse—it grabs the viewer's hand and jumps off a cliff with it. Becket is magnetic and appealing and doesn't seem to struggle with wiping the blood from his hands to get the money he feels entitled to. For younger viewers, that framing is likely to read less like a cautionary satire and more like a license to kill your conscience in the pursuit of success.