By Any Means, 2026.
Directed by Elegance Bratton.
Starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Mark Wahlberg, Nicole Beharie, Josh Lucas, LisaGay Hamilton, LaChanze, Ethan Embry, David Strathairn, and Giancarlo Esposito.
SYNOPSIS:
A notorious mafia hitman and a young Black FBI agent team up to investigate the murders of civil rights leaders in 1966 Mississippi.
Simultaneously exaggerated and empty, by the time director Elegance Bratton’s By Any Means is over, one couldn’t be blamed for forgetting that it is supposedly based on true events. Caught up in the bombast of living up to its title through Mark Wahlberg’s New Yorker Mafia hitman informant Gregory Scarpa reveling in being set loose in 1960s Mississippi without any rules or obligation to the law in pursuit of aiding FBI agent Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) – a somewhat fictional creation as little is known about who the mobster was working alongside here – in a dangerous investigation into the Ku Klux Klan and identifying its murderers of NAACP President Vernon Dahmer (Giancarlo Esposito), the film is mostly 100 minutes of uncomfortable justification of extreme violence as the only means for peace.
Don’t get it twisted, racists and anyone involved with the KKK certainly deserve whatever karma comes to their doorstep, but the vapid screenplay here from Sascha Penn (white in appearance, and in way over his head with a story this ostensibly complex about justice, punishment, and revenge, not to mention the racial dynamics at play between protagonists) sits somewhere between one step away from embracing and glorifying exploitation schlock and fleshing out a real story with human beings. Instead, it’s a film that wants to have its cake and eat it too, essentially doing neither mode satisfactorily.
It’s off from the jump, and not just due to Mark Wahlberg’s unconvincing prosthetic nose. Rather, watching his Gregory Scarpa cheerfully talk baseball while winding up his swing with a wooden bat to brutally harm a racist hillbilly who has some information on three missing civil rights activists – it’s a quick prologue to demonstrate that, for better or worse, his torturous methods of extracting information yield results – almost comes across as a demented cartoon. There is next to no character to go off of here; the depiction of Gregory Scarpa is more, well, more Mark Wahlberg than unsettling and terrorizing, like, say, the late great Ray Liotta would have come across in this role in his heyday. That’s also not to say it’s unintentionally funny watching Mark Wahlberg do his usual routine of savagely harming a racist, but more so that none of this is necessarily convincing.
The fact that the filmmakers present the fictional FBI agent Wayne Strider as more interesting than the historical figure, who had a family, worked for the mob, and became an informant, is impressive, as one would presume the opposite. Having found love in Chicago and married Allison (Nicole Beharie), Wayne has returned with her to Mississippi, as that is where he feels there is work to be done and trailblazing ground to be broken in his profession. Not long after, the KKK, tired of Vernon Dahmer offering to pay out-of-pocket a poll tax for any Black Americans who want to vote, surround his home and burn it and him to the ground (a well-staged last stand).
This prompts law enforcement to bring Gregory Scarpa back into town, who no longer wants to do this anymore. How exactly he became an informant in the first place alongside what blackmail the FBI has on him could have made for its own compelling movie provided it also delved into the man behind the psychopathic violence, but By Any Means is more of a grim and gritty mismatched buddy procedural without an intriguing mystery (spoiler alert: the identity of the killers are more hicks) set in the Deep South where its only intentions seem to be repeating over and over that Wayne’s resolve to operate by the book will get him and America nowhere. To the film’s credit, that violence is sometimes fittingly unpleasant, visceral, and unflinching in wringing information out of racists.
It could be argued that Wayne’s eventual crack into following Scarpa’s mindset is the filmmakers painting this as a tragedy, yet the characterization is so thin that it’s more plausible to suggest it’s implying, uncomfortably, that the white man is correct in his assessment of race relations (at one point, dismissing Martin Luther King Jr., although admitting he sees some value in the words of Malcolm X). There is also the reality that, 60 years later, some pockets of society have once again become highly comfortable and casual with their racism, meaning that whether this film agrees with Scarpa or not, violence hasn’t resolved the core problem. To be clear, there is no definitive answer on how to handle rampant racism. The point is that By Any Means, like Scarpa, revels more in engaging in that violence than in any bleak, substantive messaging.
Arriving at its climax, which is yet another torture sequence, nothing much has been learned about either Wayne or Scarpa. Sure, the motives become more urgent and personal for the former, torn between operating by the law and realizing that that same system could care less what happens to him, and in some cases, is just as dangerous as the racist hillbillies. That’s an inner conflict that works, and one Yahya Abdul-Mateen II sells. The rest of By Any Means is so hardheaded, akin to Scarpa, that a song of the same title plays over the end credits, with its writer a more satisfactory revelation than anything else in the movie. Now there is someone determined to achieve something by any means necessary.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder
