Deadly Dud: How To Make A Killing Reviewed

How To Make A Killing (15, 105 mins) 

Rating:

Verdict: Shoot me now

Reminders Of Him  (12A, 114 mins)

Rating:

Verdict: One to forget

One Last Deal (18, 89 mins)

Rating:

Verdict: Not totally Dyer 

The greatest of all Ealing comedies, the 1949 masterpiece Kind Hearts And Coronets, really should be left to rest in eternal peace and everlasting appreciation.

Instead, in How To Make A Killing, it is clumsily exhumed and given a modern American setting, with Glen Powell as the conniving murderer who stands to inherit a fortune if he can just knock off the seven relatives ahead of him in line.

This is director John Patton Ford’s second feature. His first was 2022’s Emily The Criminal, a pulsating thriller about a credit card fraudster played by Aubrey Plaza, which seemed to announce a filmmaker of real talent.

Alas, there isn’t much of it on show here, with a decent cast led by Powell and Margaret Qualley, as a scarlet-lipsticked femme fatale, doing their utmost to pump life (and indeed death) into a lacklustre script light on wit, tension, fun or anything else that might reward the effort of making it through to a final twist that isn’t even all that twisty.

The story is related in flashback, after Becket Redfellow (Powell), awaiting execution on Death Row, starts telling a priest his life story.

His late mother, when she got pregnant out of wedlock, was shunned by her gazillionaire father and raised Becket in working-class New Jersey, always telling him never to quit until ‘you have the right kind of life’.

So, with the inheritance still glinting from afar, that’s his mission. He duly sets about killing his kinsfolk in various sneaky ways, in one case with poisoned teeth-whitener, knowing what riches will come to him after seven funerals at the family mausoleum.

Of course, in Kind Hearts And Coronets the relatives were all played by one actor: the mighty Alec Guinness. How To Make A Killing shows none of that inventiveness; in fact it’s hard to know whether to call it a comedy, a thriller, a neo-noir or a melodrama. Let’s settle for… dud.

There is no such uncertainty about Reminders Of Him, based on Colleen Hoover’s bestselling 2022 novel. It’s a romantic weepie, albeit one that will have little impact on Kleenex stocks. 

Kenna (Maika Monroe), fresh from a jail term for ‘vehicular manslaughter under the influence’, has returned to the Wyoming town where her boyfriend Scotty (Rudy Pankow) died.

A few years earlier she took the wheel for the drive home after a blissful day of cold-water swimming and alfresco sex, up in the mountains. Little though either of them knew it, she was pregnant. But by the time she had her daughter, Diem, she was handcuffed to a hospital bed and Scotty was a goner. Now, his grieving parents (Bradley Whitford and Lauren Graham) are raising the child with the help of Scotty’s hunky best friend Ledger (Tyriq Withers), who lives across the road.

Kenna is persona non grata, yet desperate to get to know Diem. Predictably, she and Ledger start to fall for each other, opening up what we can only call a Kenna worms. Don’t worry, though… Hoover didn’t get where she is today without leaving everything clean and tidy.

That said, just because a film is based on a novel doesn’t mean the characterisations have to be paper-thin. Ledger is basically just an angel with a six-pack, while Kenna is plainly soulful and sensitive because she keeps a journal in the form of letters to dead Scotty. But neither of them is as one-dimensional as the score. If it were any cheesier

I’d feel obliged to warn off the lactose intolerant.

How’s your tolerance for Danny Dyer? The former EastEnder, once lampooned as a professional geezer, is described in the latest issue of Rolling Stone as a ‘24-carat national treasure’.

Wherever you stand, he’s jolly convincing in One Last Deal as rapacious, foul-mouthed football agent Jimmy Banks, hustling like crazy as he tries to push through lucrative new terms for his sole remaining client, a leading Premier League striker. The glitch is that the player is in court on a sexual assault charge, with the deal contingent on him getting off.

Brendan Muldowney’s film is a one-hander which unfolds over the course of a few hours and depends on Jimmy fielding lots of phone calls as he tries to deal with his star player and other pressing issues, including a blackmail attempt. He also talks to himself a lot, and to give you a sense of how ripe his language is, ‘contract’ is only his second-favourite C-word.

The narrative gets wildly overwrought and the film isn’t in the same league as Locke, Steven Knight’s riveting 2013 solo piece starring Tom Hardy. But fair’s fair. At the end of the day, Dyer plays a blinder.

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The greatest British landscape painters, JMW Turner and John Constable, born just over a year apart, are celebrated in a wonderful exhibition at Tate Britain, running until April 12. Well, I say it’s wonderful without having seen it yet. But an absorbing documentary, Turner & Constable (PG, 93 mins, four stars), feels almost as good as being there in person, delivering compelling portraits of both men. If you’ve seen Mike Leigh’s glorious 2014 biopic Mr Turner, you’ll know about their waspish rivalry, but they also had plenty in common – not least fierce criticism from their contemporaries.

Turner, mocked for his obsession with yellow paint (such as in The Burning Of The Houses Of Lords And Commons, left), was told he was suffering from ‘jaundice of the retina’. Constable was derided for his broad brushstrokes. Fascinating stuff.

I was fascinated by The Tasters (15, 123 mins, three stars) too, until I learned that the ‘true story’ on which it is based has been widely questioned. In 2012, 95-year-old Margot Wolk claimed she’d been one of 15 young German women selected to taste food about to be served to Adolf Hitler, in case it had been poisoned. Her recollections, although doubted by some historians, inspired novels, a play, and now this German-language film by Italian director Silvio Soldini.

Adding spice rather than strychnine are a couple of clunky subplots, one involving sexual shenanigans with the Nazi commanding officer.

It’s perfectly watchable, but feels like a slightly strained attempt to find a new perspective on the Second World War.