When things are at risk of getting too much for me, a two-hour dose of shallow, unrealistic escapism—preferably funny and riddled with contradictions and not violent—perks me up no end. Films of this kind don’t quarrel with their audience. In “The Man With The Golden Gun” (a Bond film from 1975), a black-tracksuit-wearing assassin with a Cheshire-cat grin plunks a golden bullet in his victims, for which “he charges a million a shot.” In a fresh, diverting, spritely caper released this weekend, Glen Powell looks as if he can’t believe his luck to have been cast in such a great role as Becket and hardly stops smiling.
“Get up,” a death-row-prison guard says. “You got a visitor.” A sleepy Catholic priest sits the other side of the bars. “How are you feeling today?” he asks. “Cheesecake?” Becket says. “No, thank you.” “You know, I ordered vanilla and they brought me chocolate.” “Is there nothing you’d like to share?” This elegant device awards Becket permission to narrate the story before the four-hour countdown commences with “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Compared with what the priest has heard, “the real story is much more impressive.” “You want to tell me about it?” Definitely!
Newark is undoubtedly known in Montrose as either an English town served by the East Coast Main Line or an airport in New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan. In “How to Make a Killing” (StudioCanal), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, it is a “grimy” signifier of the lower social class to which Becket’s mum is exiled by her gluttonous family when she falls pregnant aged eighteen. But little Becket hasn’t been disinherited; he might come into “the entire thing some day.” “I just have to wait,” he says, “for all [seven] of them to die.” A small girl named Julia asks, “Do you live in the street?” at a school piano competition. “I won’t be there forever because I’m supposed to inherit a lot of money,” he says, planting a seed in Julia’s mind, “or something.” He asks his grandfather for “rightful” help after his mum dies. The butler presents a typed note through the locked front gate of the big, showy, stone mansion; “We hope this finds you well,” but, No.
A couple of decades later, Becket has a “perfectly respectable job” in a swanky menswear store of the type found in London’s Saville Row. One morning he is told of his non-negotiable transfer to the warehouse in Newark. “You’re giving my job to the owner’s nineteen-year-old kid?” Becket’s mind wanders back to his own family. “Sadly,” he says, “their mortality rate was irritatingly low.” He would “never see a penny of the fortune. And maybe that was fine.” Sweetheart Julia, played by Margaret Qualley, who will appear several more times, and who has married somebody rich, passes by his shop later that day. “Call me when you’ve killed them all,” she says.
“If I were to prune a few branches of the family tree, where would I start?” Those about to be bumped off are the kind of human parasites who take far more than their share of the earth’s resources and give back precisely nothing. Referencing “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013), his first victim leans out of a helicopter door and empties an overstuffed swag bag onto his rich friends at a pool party below, shrieking, “You’re all still poor!” Just before Becket finishes him off, a “time out.” “I gotta think…Am I actually carrying this through?” He introduces himself to his uncle at the funeral. (He attends all the funerals, usually wearing either a beanie or a baseball cap. Before one of them he visits a florist; “Do you have any sympathy lilies?” he asks.) How about that newly vacant position at the family financial-services firm which has made many fortunes? “It’s nepotism,” uncle says, before opening a bottle of liquor he “got from Dick Cheney.” “This was never the plan,” Becket says, “but I did need a job,” and besides, “I might have a fortune of my own to manage some day.”
“Anyway, who’s next?” The death of number two, Noah, the only remotely likeable one amongst them, also introduces his girlfriend to the plot; Ruth, played by Jessica Henwick, “works in denim” but “for the record,” is “changing careers.” Becket and Ruth flirt. Noah is a pretentious artist. At a grindingly dull dinner party, he says that he hates kids, “except Eastern European kids who are very quiet—they’re traumatised and work very hard.” Becket needs a “plan, a real plan” for Noah, which will mean mixing raw chemicals to make dynamite. After he and Ruth get together, Becket says that he “might as well call the sheriff myself,” his identity being so obvious. But onwards to number three—a self-styled “pastor” who sports orange fake tan and chit-chats with “my buddy J.C.” and is on the run from authorities across the world. “If he ended up in a dumpster,” Becket says, before doctoring a pre-workout supplement, “perhaps it would be God’s will.”
There may be no baddie named Hai Fat or airborne wing-sprouting car but, like “Golden Gun,” this a movie not to be taken seriously in any way. It never makes the audience restless. Eventually the F.B.I. turn up but don’t turn up any evidence. (They ask Becket if he will inherit; “Not to my knowledge,” he says.) Resisting the obvious segue from dark comedy into gloomy detective story was a bright decision. The film is as light as a hungry house sparrow perched upon a Montrose garden feeder in the spring. After describing the murder of the phony pastor, Becket tells the Catholic priest that “the church didn’t want an investigation,” and then winks; “I’m sure you know all about that.” And later they philosophise. “You can, in fact, get away with murder,” Becket says, still smiling away with his friendly, villainous eyes. “You can even get rewarded for it!” Actually “the whole thing gave you a strange thrill.”
Adam Poole
12th March 2026
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