Dir: John Patton Ford, UK/France, 2026, 105 mins
Cast: Glen Powell, Margaret Qualley, Jessica Henwick, Ed Harris
Review by Carol Allen
And to give it a one line review, Kind Hearts and Coronets is a helluva lot better! Surprisingly it is produced by a British company Blueprint Pictures (they should apologise at once to the ghosts of Ealing), transposed to an American setting but shot in South Africa. And it is really rather feeble.
Glen Powell, who was rather good in the recent Edgar Wright movie The Running Man, has a certain charm as Becket Redfellow, whose mother Mary (Nell Williams) was cut off by her rich family for getting pregnant by a humble cellist and refusing to have an abortion. Brought up with love but in poverty by his widowed mother, after she dies and he is sacked from his job in a menswear shop, Becket decides to kill off the seven family members who stand between him and what he sees as his rightful inheritance. He is egged on by his now married former childhood sweetheart Julia, played by Margaret Qualley, who has legs as long as Joanna Lumley’s and uses them to great effect. He later marries Ruth (Jessica Henwick) doing her best in the uninteresting role of the widow of one his victims
The film starts off quite promisingly with Becket in jail telling his tale to the priest in residence (Adrian Lukis). But once we get into the bumping off of the relatives, things get boring. They are such a dreary lot – not one of them anywhere near the rich comedy of any ONE of the seven characters played by Alec Guiness in the earlier film. And after a while the excess of voice over narration from Becket gets tedious too.
There is however an exception and that is Becket’s final killing – his grandfather, the man who banished his own daughter. Played by a scenery chewing Ed Harris, he really gives the film a lift. But otherwise it’s a bit of a slog and for a supposed comedy, sadly lacking in laughs
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