Glen Powell's 'How to Make a Killing' Bombed in February. It's the No. 1 Movie on HBO Max Now.

A24 sent "How to Make a Killing" out to die in February. It opened to $20.4 million on a $15 million budget, the kind of number that gets a movie a polite obituary and a fast walk to the digital shelf. Four months later it is the most-watched movie in the country. It landed on HBO Max on June 19 and has sat at number one on the U.S. movie chart since June 21. So a fair question for anyone scrolling past the thumbnail this weekend: did the theatrical crowd miss something, or did the couch just lower the bar?

A little of both, and the second one more than the first.

What it is

John Patton Ford, who made the lean and excellent "Emily the Criminal" in 2022, takes his swing at a much bigger canvas here. The source is a deep cut: the 1949 Ealing comedy "Kind Hearts and Coronets," itself drawn from a 1907 novel, transplanted from Edwardian England to present-day New York. (Present-day New York is played, often unconvincingly, by Cape Town, where the thing was shot.)

Glen Powell is Becket Redfellow, the exiled grandson of an obscenely rich family. His teenage mother got pregnant, got banished, and raised him working-class while the billionaires pretended he didn't exist. Demoted from a dead-end job at a suit store and humiliated in front of an old crush, Becket does the math: he is eighth in line to the family fortune. Seven relatives stand between him and generational money. He starts subtracting.

The framing device is Becket on death row, four hours from execution, confessing the whole thing to a priest. Powell narrates. It is a sturdy old structure and it mostly works, which is more than you can say for some of what it holds up.

Where it works

Powell is the reason this is a number-one streaming title and not a forgotten one. He has the movie-star gear that makes watching a serial killer pleasant company, the same trick Richard Linklater put to sharper use in "Hit Man." Owen Gleiberman at Variety credited Powell with carrying the film on an "energized sense of play," and that is the right read. When Powell is on, the movie cruises.

The bench helps. Bill Camp gives Becket's uncle real warmth, enough that the kill math gets genuinely complicated for a stretch. Jessica Henwick plays a schoolteacher named Ruth with a grounded sweetness that the movie does not deserve. Zach Woods turns up as a cousin, a fraud of an artist who signs a photo "The White Basquiat," and gets the biggest laugh in the picture. Todd Banhazl shoots it clean and bright, Emile Mosseri's score keeps things bouncing, and the whole thing slides down easy. That is not nothing. Easy is exactly what wins on a streaming home page on a Friday night.

Where it doesn't

The premise promises teeth and the movie keeps its mouth closed. "Kind Hearts and Coronets" was a scalpel. This is a butter knife. The victims are introduced and dispatched so quickly that most of them barely register as people, which means their deaths carry no charge, comic or otherwise. Topher Grace shows up as a perma-tanned evangelist who whines about being judged for his friendship with El Chapo, the kind of gag that should land like a slap and instead just sort of waves. The killings are staged for absurdist laughs that rarely arrive.

The bigger problem is that the movie wants to "eat the rich" and also wants you to root for the guy clawing his way into being one of them, and it never decides how it feels about that. The Guardian's Benjamin Lee called it "stylishly made" but "a real mess," and the mess is tonal. Richard Roeper, no enemy of a fun studio picture, landed on the harshest accurate word: the film commits "the unforgivable crime of being dull." For a comedy about a man murdering his entire family for a yacht, dull is a strange and damning thing to be.

Powell himself can only do so much. The script gives him charm but no interior. We never get a clear look at what turns an amiable underachiever into a man who can poison a cousin and order dessert, and the movie treats that switch as a given rather than a question worth asking. There is reportedly a lot of road behind this cut. Ford has said editing took 308 days and required drastic reshaping, and you can feel the reshaping, the sense of a sharper movie that got sanded down to something frictionless.

The numbers and the verdict

Critics split almost exactly down the middle, 44 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, a 51 on Metacritic. Audiences have been kinder, sitting around 75 percent, and the HBO Max run says they mean it. That gap is the whole story. This is a movie engineered, almost by accident, for the second window. In a theater you are paying for teeth, and it has none. On a couch you are paying for ninety-odd minutes of Glen Powell being charming in a nice-looking thriller, and it delivers exactly that and not one ounce more.

It is a fun, handsome, weightless watch that mistakes a great premise for a finished one. The streaming crowd isn't wrong to press play. They are just grading it on the right curve.

BCN score: 6 out of 10. Glen Powell is worth the rental he isn't charging you. The movie around him needed another draft and got another edit instead.

"How to Make a Killing" is rated R, runs about 105 minutes, and is streaming on HBO Max.