Written and Directed by John Patton Ford | 105 min | ▲▲ 

This filmmaker wowed audiences his last time out with a cracking, pertinent thriller, Emily The Criminal. More’s the shame he’s bungled the follow-up, a picture that arrives with a promising satiric premise but never achieves anything close to that promise.

If you’ve seen the trailer you know the gist: Beckett Redfellow (Glen Powell) was disowned at birth when his teenaged mother chose to keep her baby conceived out of wedlock — she’s the scion of an obscenely wealthy New York family. She died while Beckett was still a kid, but when he grows up he knows what he has to do to vindicate Mom: kill every other heir to the multi-billion dollar fortune and take all the money himself.

Yes, this picture shares a lot of storytelling DNA with the classic Ealing comedy, Kind Hearts and Coronets, not to mention Park Chan-wook’s No Other Way, but without the inspiration of either — the movie misses every opportunity to be genuinely nasty or subversively funny.

It instead softens Beckett, having him find an alternative — a role in the family business and love with Jessica Henwick. That just won’t fly, despite the delicious presence of Margaret Qualley as a full-on femme fatale — this movie can’t find a manageable tone with both hands. Powell was charming in Hit Man and fleet of foot in The Running Man, but here he never succeeds at getting us to care about him, no matter who he’s killing.