Has Glen Powell run out of steam?

What happens to an acting career based on raffish magnetism when the charm starts to wear thin? What next for an A-lister when it becomes clear he is only capable of one performance? The CV of Glen Powell (Hit Man, Anyone But You, The Running Man) is a fascinating real-time case study on the perils of not venturing outside an extremely limited comfort zone.

With How to Make a Killing, Powell, who has thus far coasted on impeccable bone structure and affable cheesiness – he always seems to be on the brink of winking at the camera and pulling finger guns – may have finally run out of momentum.

This is the second feature from the writer-director John Patton Ford, who broke into the US indie scene with his enjoyably mordant crime thriller Emily the Criminal, starring Aubrey Plaza as a desperate, debt-saddled young woman lured by the easy gains of credit card fraud. His new movie, which is loosely inspired by the 1949 black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, once again deals with illicit shortcuts to wealth, but on a grander scale.

Powell is Becket Redfellow, the illegitimate son of heiress Mary Redfellow (Nell Williams). Both mother and son are cast out from the family, thanks to the shame of Becket’s parentage; even after his mother’s untimely death, he is offered no support from his maternal relatives.

However, courtesy of an unlikely but dramatically convenient legal contrivance, Becket is a potential heir to the multibillion-dollar Redfellow fortune. He just needs to remove the obstacles in his way: the seven remaining members of the clan. Cue an inventive murder spree.

With its morbid fascination with the super-rich and generous body count, this should be a slick crime romp of the kind that Rian Johnson has perfected. But without the sharp writing, plotting and wit of Johnson’s whodunnit series, this is Knives Out retooled with plastic picnic cutlery.

Powell is not the only problem, but he is a considerable one. With his freakishly smooth and disconcertingly inexpressive face, plus an emotional range that is limited to various shades of smirk, his protagonist is possibly the most uninteresting man ever to embark on an orgy of killing. He might share Patrick Bateman’s Wall Street career and taste for sharp suits, but Becket has none of the grisly panache that made Christian Bale’s American psycho so compelling. Ford insists on making his central character sympathetic – quite an ask for a man concealed under a Teflon-coated layer of smugness, even as he slaughters his cousins.

And so Ford makes the other Redfellows so appalling that they clearly deserve to die. Unfortunately, this also makes them far more chewy and memorable figures than the blandly hard-done-by antihero.

Of course, there’s a femme fatale in the wings, ready to manipulate the hapless, misunderstood multiple murderer. Margaret Qualley plays Becket’s unattainable childhood crush Julia, a rich and treacherous vamp who has never met a piece of furniture she couldn’t seductively drape her legs over.

She’s also so unfeasibly wealthy that she seemingly never wears clothes on the bottom half of her body (presumably, the impermeable layer of glossy entitlement keeps her warm). Julia alone sees Becket for what he is. Perhaps this picture might have worked better if the storytelling was more savage, or the film-making more daring and stylish. Maybe it could have had more bite if the lead character was gender-flipped and Ford had reunited with Plaza in the central role. But it fails to take the risks it would need to succeed.

Instead, a spurious cautionary tale is tacked on in the final sequence in a last-ditch attempt to regain the moral high ground. It’s a jarring turn for a movie that has spent the previous 90 minutes serving up slaughter for comic effect. In practice, however, nobody’s laughing. Except Powell, of course, who can’t seem to wipe that punchable grin off his face.

Photograph by A24