The Great Gatsby Meets American Psycho in Revenge Comedy
DIRECTOR: JOHN PATTON FORD/2026
If only a few people stood between you and a $28 billion, what would you do? If you’re Becket Redfellow, you get creative.
After his mother’s excommunication from the Redfellow family, Becket (Glen Powell) grows up in lower class New Jersey; after her passing, he grows up an orphan. He promised her he’d find “the right kind of life,” but as an adult, he’s still struggling to find it. Then an idea comes when he bumps into his childhood crush Julia (Margaret Qualley)—why not bring the “right kind of life” to him? With a few quick prunes to the family tree, he could advance to the finish line for the Redfellow inheritance he’s eligible for, along with a sweet bonus of revenge.
How to Make a Killing remakes the 1949 Alec Guinness comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, continuing a streak of 2026 movies owing a debt to others before them. Mercy riffs on Minority Report, Send Help overlaps with The Triangle of Sadness, and Crime 101 pays homage to Heat. As the adage goes, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal,” so that’s not an inherent flaw (and, to be fair, Send Help was written before Sadness won the Palme d’Or). But How to Make a Killing pulls off the job better than any of them because how many of you have seen Kind Hearts and Coronets? If I’m being honest, I’m not sure I would’ve made the time for it if not for a worldwide pandemic, and my only thought as Killing’s credits rolled was, “This reminds me a bit of that Alec Guinness movie where he wears a bunch of disguises.”
For the record, those “disguises” were actually Guinness playing the lead and all of his relatives in makeup, and except for that running joke, Killing is almost a beat-for-beat remake. Coronets is charming, but it has such a small cultural footprint I’d forgotten the plot in just a few years—this is the kind of movie that deserves a remake. Remakes, reboots, and legacy sequels carry the baggage of expectation, inviting the audiences to feel like experts. No matter how successful, viewers will never give their full attention to the story in front of them because they’re using part of their brain to compare and contrast with the previous work. Yes, Mercy didn’t need to be so junky, but it only made matters worse by setting the bar with an all-time Steven Spielberg title.
Audiences might think of the class-conscious romance The Great Gatsby, the violent satire American Psycho, or the capitalist critique Wall Street while watching How to Make a Killing, but only a handful will think of Coronets, which means there’s more room to be surprised by twists. There’s also more room to be swept up in scene-stealing cameos like Topher Grace’s haughty prosperity gospel preacher and Zach Woods’s obnoxious artist. If you can give yourself over to somewhat rickety plot machinations, Killing is a noir comedy built on an entertaining ensemble. Qualley—head-to-toe in tweed and bouclé Chanel suits because Julia has no imagination beyond the runway’s suggestions—is having the time of her life as a femme fatale, wielding her mile-long legs as a weapon.
Because Powell knows how to hold a movie about a morally conflicted character together, How to Make a Killing turns out to be quite entertaining. It also deserves credit for exploring the greed that drives us more than a genre vehicle needs to. The more time I spend with Powell, the more I think of a classic Old Hollywood movie star—Gene Kelly, to be specific. Even when starring in B-movie musicals and roller skating in Xanadu, his energy never wavered, eyes big and grin wide enough for the back of the theater. His dancing was defined both by his technical expertise and by an enthusiasm he couldn’t hide. I’ve yet to see Powell sing or dance, but also yet to see him not give 1000% of his energy at the task before him, whether it’s donning disguises in Hit Man, singlehandedly attempting to save the rom-com in Anyone But You, or earning extra credit at Tom Cruise Film School. When he hosted Saturday Night Live in November, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen host having so much fun, maybe because like Kelly, he has no shame in letting people know he likes to try and to try hard.