How to Make a Killing | Film Review

Written By Ian Maisel

Released February 20, 2026

Inheritance Is a Hell of a Drug

How to Make a Killing is what happens when a movie looks morality dead in the eyes, winks, and steals its wallet. Glen Powell stars as a man living in the financial shadow of his own family, knowing exactly what his life “should have been” if one cruel old decision hadn’t rerouted the inheritance pipeline. His mother gets cut out of the fortune, the cousins grow up rich like it’s their natural habitat, and he’s left working as a late-30s clothier in Manhattan, selling expensive clothes to people like his family.

It’s an oddly specific pain, one that I personally experienced with my wealthy father, and the movie nails the premise with enough truth to make the comedy black as night. Because when the setup is real, the fantasy of revenge doesn’t need to be deep. It just needs to be cathartic.

And catharsis is what this movie delivers, in the most gleefully irresponsible way possible. Powell’s character starts killing off family members to reclaim the fortune, and the joke is how easy it is. His first kill requires the actual work of renting a jet ski. After that, the murders become almost absurdly casual: a few drops of poison, a planted explosion, a spa day with a complimentary teeth whitening tray. He drifts in and out of people’s lives with a grin, does something unspeakable, and strolls away like he just returned a sweater.

And here’s the audacious part: the movie refuses to punish him. It’s a success story. The moral is, “Sometimes the bad guy wins just because he looks like Tom Cruise.”

And the ending commits to the bit in a way that feels perfectly calibrated for the current cultural mood: crime pays, charisma pays more, and consequences are for people without good lawyers. He gets framed for a murder and blackmailed at the end of the movie by his impossibly hot childhood girlfriend, she gets the inheritance, and then they ride off together in a chauffeured Rolls Royce like they just closed on a beach house.

Two things hold it back from being an all-time classic. For a movie set among wealthy people and glamorous settings, it’s underlit, like the production team couldn’t afford a few hundred grand of extra lighting rigs. And the casting at the end: Ed Harris is cast as Glen’s grandpa, but he only reads about 25 years older than our smirking antihero, so it plays as a father/son showdown instead of a real dynastic struggle.

Still, those are small dents in a very shiny car. How to Make a Killing is light, clever, and surprisingly satisfying: a dark inheritance story told with a grin so big it practically dares you to judge it. I didn’t. I laughed a lot.

Ian Maisel

When I was in high school I worked as a movie theater projectionist, acted in my school plays, and published a series of autobiographical comic books that I sold at music and bookstores. I’ve always loved entertainment, and at Brown University I double majored in Visual Arts and Modern European History because the history teachers told the best stories.

My career began at an artificial intelligence startup company where I worked as a graphic designer and animator creating 3D avatars for virtual personalities. I used a program called Poser that was kind of like a Barbie Dream House for cartoons. My comic illustrations were published in the international edition of Time magazine.

In 2006, I completed a graduate Certificate of Publishing and Communications at Harvard University, where I studied creative writing, acting, and media production. I auditioned for the student theater and was cast in a high-brow Chekhov play and a low-brow undergraduate comedy where I played a California high school guitarist like Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

At Boston College I continued developing my career as a graphic designer and went on to work as an animator at a Jewish nonprofit. In 2008 I left Boston to chase the California dream. I got a job in San Francisco as a litigation graphics specialist for intellectual property attorneys, and I worked on some high-stakes legal trials where I barely slept for a week!

After five years I transitioned into the corporate world and worked as a contract presentation designer at Visa and Bare Minerals. I enjoyed collaborating with senior executives to bring their ideas to life through graphic storytelling and large-scale event presentations. One of my highlights was getting to opportunity to produce an in-house interview with the supermodel Christy Turlington!

In 2017 I took on my first Senior Designer role at Alexandria Real Estate, where I designed high-end investor presentations and art directed photoshoots for major tech companies including Facebook, Google, and Pinterest. The following year I flew out to LA to study video production, and went on to create a digital signage content management system for Alexandria’s 60+ high-tech office buildings across the country.

In 2020 I expanded my focus into social media by producing a video advertising campaign that launched a Visa executive’s speaking career by generating 30,000 social media engagements in five months. Since then I’ve continued designing creative presentations, producing videos, and writing social media campaigns for a wide range of brands including the University of San Francisco and Meta. I love working with high-performance creative teams on exciting projects and enjoy utilizing my creative background to work at the intersection of design, entertainment, and culture.

https://www.ianmaisel.com
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