How to Make a Killing

Posted on February 20, 2026 at 3:37 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	R for violence, sexual references, pervasive language, and some drug use

I never had the love for Glen Powell’s “Hit Man” that most people did. The set-up and the wit were all wonderfully entertaining and the chemistry between Powell and Adria Arjona was off the charts, but the “happy” ending was too dark to fit the world of the rest of the film. The same issue creates even bigger problems with Powell’s new film, “How to Make a Killing,” inspired by the classic “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” with Alec Guinness playing eight roles, all relatives who were killed off, one by one, by a wily schemer. The multiple roles gimmick is fun, but that film, a Criterion Collection gem, works because it is an outstanding example of a black comedy. This one should have studied it more closely.

Like the original, this one begins with the hero/anti-hero in prison, waiting for his execution. Powell plays Becket Redfellow, whose mother was disowned by her very wealthy family when she became pregnant at age 18 and refused to have an abortion. His father died when he was an infant, so his mother raised him alone for a few years until she died, making him promise he would do whatever it took to have the “right life,” he deserved. By “right” she meant the wealth and prestige of her family. But when Becket, still a child, asked if his mother could be buried in the family mausoleum, the butler handed him a note with a “polite” refusal that wished him well.

As a child, Becket had a crush on Julia (Margaret Qualley as an adult). In Great Expectations fashion, they are separated for years and then meet again. He is still enthralled by her, but she is engaged to a man who shares her social cachet. She turns down his offer to get together to catch up and makes a joke about how Beckett should kill off those ahead of him in line to inherit his grandfather’s multi-billion dollar estate.

And then Beckett starts to kill off those ahead of him in line to inherit the estate. (Conveniently for the plot, the entire estate automatically goes to whoever is next in line.)

This gives us a chance to meet the relatives, who are all arrogant and selfish and not that interesting. There’s a partying finance bro, a pretentious artist, and a woman who brags about adopting 11 children from different countries. Topher Grace brings some vitality to his role as something between a prosperity gospel huckster and a personal empowerment huckster. One of the relatives turns out to be a decent guy, but he conveniently dies of natural causes. Cut to yet another scene in front of the family mausoleum.

A movie that asks us to root for a ruthless (note the name of a key character) serial killer needs a consistent, heightened, satiric tone and very sharp and specific characters. Think of a film like the original British version of “Bedazzled” (the Brendan Fraser remake is pretty good, too). The actors here seem to be coming from different movies. It should also have clever crimes. Like the characters, the crimes here are bland, and like “Hit Man” the end is unsatisfying and sour. Even a very black-humor-based movie has to have some kind of moral core. This one is just empty.

Parents should know that this film involves a series of murders of family members. Characters drink alcohol, smoke tobacco and weed, and use very strong language.

Family discussion: What is the “right life?” Why were the members of this family so selfish?

If you like this, try: “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” “Gross Pointe Blank,” and “Mr. Right”

Flight Risk

Posted on January 23, 2025 at 7:12 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for violence and language
Profanity:	Very strong and crude languagecdure
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Extended peril and violence, airplane peril, characters injured and killed, some grisly and disturbing images
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	January 24, 2025

“Flight Risk” has all of the ingredients for a tight little thriller except one. There’s a good set-up — transport of a cooperating witness, accompanied by just one US Marshal in her first return to field work after a failure that left her feeling vulnerable, and a pilot sent by the bad guys to kill the witness. It has a good setting — a small plane flying through the snowy mountains of Alaska. And a good run-time — just over 90 minutes. But the direction by Mel Gibson is sloppy. Not the editing or special effects, which range from serviceable to tense, but some of the choices that interfere with the best the movie has to offer.

Topher Grace, who plays Winston, is, as always, immediately engaging, well cast as the talkative prisoner. He’s first seen in a low-end motel, sitting on the bed and staring into an aged microwave waiting for it to warm up a styrofoam cup of soup. US Marshals break in and he immediately offers to cooperate with them. Like Charles Grodin in the infinitely better “Midnight Run,” Winston was an accountant for a vicious mob boss. He agrees to tell law enforcement everything he knows if they will give him immunity and protection.

Michelle Dockery (“Downton Abbey”) is Madolyn Harris. She has to bring Winston east to testify in the gangster’s trial. Without his testimony, there will not be enough evidence to convict him. She charters a plane, gets Winston settled with handcuffs, and takes the only other seat, next to the pilot (Mark Wahlberg), who says his name is Booth. His backwards baseball cap, chewing gum, and cornpone accent do not create a great deal of confidence, but he assures Madolyn that they’ll be in Anchorage and on their way to Seattle in 90 minutes.

Except he was never told their next stop was Seattle. Madolyn gets suspicious. “Booth” is there to kill Winston. He is also the only pilot on board. There is nothing around them but snowy mountains. The rest of the movie is the very bumpy ride.

The problem is that the fun of all the tension and action is interrupted by weird dialogue that is as off-balance as the plane. As Madolyn is using the limited access to her phone to update her colleagues (and try to figure out who has been leaking key information to the gangster), she is also on with Hassan (Maaz Ali), a pilot who is talking her through the instrumentation. He is creepily predatory, in the midst of the direst possible situation insisting that she go on a date with him. What is the idea behind this? Is there any world where someone might imagine this could be reassuring? It j’ust kept taking me out of the film.

And then there is “Booth.” Reportedly, Gibson let Wahlberg write some of his own dialogue, which gives his character a chance to free-associate a series of comments that he and Gibson may have considered evidence of recklessness and pleasure in hurting people, showing us why he is so dangerous. But they are crude and off-kilter (too many references to prison rape, for example) in a way that is at odds with the tempo and tone of the film. They’re also tedious. They do not add anything to the sense of menace or the stakes. It just comes across as self-indulgent, the last thing you want in a 90-minute thriller.

Parent should know that this is a very violent film with a knife, a flare gun, a very dangerous plane flight, criminal behavior and corruption, and extended strong language with very crude sexual references.

Family discussion: How did Madolyn decide who she could trust? How did her past experience help or hurt her ability to handle the challenges of this transport?

If you like this, try: “Plane,” “Fathom,” and “Con Air”

Two Off-Beat Streaming Picks: The Incredible Jessica James and Opening Night

Posted on July 31, 2017 at 9:37 pm

Not in the mood for superheroes? Two indie picks worth watching premiere this week on streaming services.

“The Incredible Jessica James” (Netflix) is a star-making vehicle for Jessica Williams, “The Daily Show’s” youngest correspondent. She had a small role in the previous film from writer/director Jim Strouse, and he wrote this film for her. As it opens, she does a fierce, funny, and free dance through her apartment and onto the roof and by the time the credits are over, we are completely captivated. The story is nothing new. She’s an aspiring playwright trying to find her way in New York City, with a wall covered in rejection letters and a heart recently broken in a breakup with a guy (Lakeith Stanfield) who is very appealing, so we feel for her. She attends her younger sister’s baby shower. She tries to help a young girl in the drama class she teaches. She goes on a blind date. She has a quirky/quippy best friend (Noel Wells). It’s a pretty standard romantic comedy. But Williams has a nice chemistry with Chris Dowd as her possible new love, there are some funny lines, and she is utterly irresistible. See it. You’ll have fun and you’ll always be able to say that right from the beginning you knew she’d be a star.

“Opening Night” (Amazon) is a backstage story about a dumb jukebox musical and all of the drama and chaos that goes into giving the audience a great show. It’s wildly uneven, as though it was put together by an improv group or maybe its large cast each wrote a premise on a slip of paper and then everyone picked one out of a hat. Topher Grace is appealing, as always, if slumming a bit as the one-time performer turned stage manager, dealing with various crises of love, fear, and various substances. A plotline about male and female dancers competing to seduce the new guy goes on way too long and way too far as does another about the cynical star’s accidental ingestion of drugs. It’s the kind of raunchy that indicates a failure of imagination. What makes it fun is the cast of real theatrical performers who show us that the show really must go on. It kind of makes me wish we were sitting out front to see them do the whole show.

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Truth

Posted on October 22, 2015 at 5:03 pm

Often a movie “based on a true story” confirms and extends our understanding of what happened. This film, based on the “true story” that led to the departure of one of the most respected newsmen of all time, Dan Rather, from CBS, asserts its ambitions with its title and goes on to explore the very nature of truth and our willingness or ability to uncover and recognize it. I did not have strong views about what happened in 2004, just a recollection of the incident as a turning point, with the most respected broadcast journalist in the country being brought down by bloggers, who were able to determine that documents relied on in a story about President George W. Bush were forgeries. In my mind, the story was about the shift from old to new media, where the Davids of the blogosphere could challenge the powerful Goliaths of CBS News.

But in this movie, based on the book by Rather’s producer, Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett, blazingly intelligent and forceful), we see another side of the story, written by James Vanderbilt. This is her version (if there is such a thing as versions) of the truth.

No matter which version of the story you believe, lesson number one of this movie is that you are at your most vulnerable when you feel most powerful. Mapes has just come off the greatest triumph of her career, the Peabody award-winning story about the horrific abuse of prisoners by the US military at Abu Ghraib. She is looking for another great scoop, and as the Presidential election approaches, it looks like she has one. Rumors about special treatment for George W. Bush, both in being allowed to serve in the National Guard and during his time there, have circulated for years, and now there seems to be substantiation, including on-the-record statements by the former Lieutenant Governor and some memos from the younger Bush’s commanding officer. Four document experts were called in by Mapes to authenticate the documents and, with the proviso that as photocopies there was no way to test the ink or paper of the originals to verify them completely, the experts signed off. The other steps taken by Mapes and the staff of reporters, including research expert Mike Smith (Topher Grace, who should be in more movies) and former military officer Dennis Quaid (ditto), are impressive. But it is possible that their supervisors did not ask enough questions and it is certain that moving up the broadcast date at the last minute cut off their ability to lock down all of the story.

And then it all fell apart. Bloggers identified problems with the memos’ fonts that indicated they were created on a computer, not a typewriter, and thus could not have been written in the 1970’s. CBS convened a commission led by a former (Republican) Attorney General to review the story. Their focus was not as much on whether the story was true or not (the memos were just one small part of the story) but whether the reporters had a political agenda.

A lot of people got fired. Smith makes a speech on the way out the door that identifies a culprit more insidious than partisan politics — corporate conflicts of interest. There are times when protection of shareholder value is not consistent with getting the story. The most important question this movie asks is what that means for democracy and for, well, truth.

Parents should know that this movie has very strong language and brief nudity in a photograph. Characters drink and take medicine to deal with stress. There are references to torture and child abuse and there are tense confrontations.

Family discussion: What should Mary have done differently? How did her childhood experiences affect her relationship with Rather and her response to her father? Should she have followed her lawyer’s advice?

If you like this, try two other fact-based films about journalists fighting to expose the truth about powerful people: “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight“

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Based on a true story Drama Journalism

Trailer: “Truth” with Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett

Posted on September 29, 2015 at 9:00 am

Robert Redford plays Dan Rather, one of the most respected journalists in television, whose career collapsed after he reported a story about George W. Bush’s military service that turned out to be based on forged documents. Cate Blanchett and Topher Grace co-star in “Truth,” which tells that story.

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