THE STORY – A young Black FBI agent is sent into 1960s Mississippi to investigate a wave of brutal killings targeting civil rights leaders. Forced to work alongside notorious mafia hitman Greg Scarpa, he finds himself pulled into a deadly hunt where justice and vengeance begin to blur.
THE CAST – Mark Wahlberg, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Nicole Beharie, Josh Lucas, David Strathairn & Giancarlo Esposito
THE TEAM– Elegance Bratton (Director) & Sascha Penn (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 107 Minutes
For those who saw Elegance Bratton’s “The Inspection,” the touching drama about a young closeted man navigating parental troubles and his military career, they would never have expected his follow-up film to be a traditional mid-budget studio film starring Mark Wahlberg. Yet as soon as “By Any Means” starts playing archive news footage of real murders during Jim Crow-era America, it easily clicks on a thematic level, where Bratton tries to go with Sascha Penn’s screenplay. The film, which feels like a tried-and-true studio-tested mixture of “Green Book” and “Mississippi Burning,” is entertaining enough that it satisfies the most fundamental goals of any film while still falling short of the pedigree of a picture that someone of Bratton’s talent could make.
“By Any Means” follows Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Wayne Striker, a Black FBI agent now back home in Mississippi, who hopes to be part of the change he wants to see as the Civil Rights movement begins reaching a breaking point. Saddled by his superiors, the bureau is pressured by J. Edgar Hoover, amidst the rising tension, to solve the murder of Giancarlo Esposito’s Vernon Dahmer. Unfortunately for Wayne, who gets a moment to rise to the occasion, the operation can’t be documented, a fact underscored by the involvement of a mob-affiliated hitman, Gregory Scarpa, played by Wahlberg. While hunting down the Klan members responsible for Vernon’s murder, Wayne and Gregory engage in a battle of morals over whether they’re able to get the confessions needed to solve the case.
This moral fight would have more to chew on for audiences if Penn’s screenplay didn’t make it far more one-sided. While Wayne goes on about what the right thing to do is, he ultimately succumbs to Gregory’s more virulent nature, which is why the FBI hires him in the first place. It’s a tough ask for audiences to dismiss Gregory’s violent methodology, since those watching already accept how horrid a human he is from his uber-gruesome introduction and can easily set it aside in the face of how immorally unredeemable these hate-fueled antagonists are. The scales are never perfectly balanced between the two leads in terms of their beliefs, especially when one side is proven to work consistently. It also doesn’t help that Wahlberg is given a far more showy character, playing up Gregory’s scumbag nature and making him, at the least, an entertaining presence on screen.
To say that Wahlberg is giving a good performance is debatable, as it’s harder to tell what’s more imposing on the audience’s suspension of disbelief: that Wahlberg can play an Italian Yankees fan from Bensonhurst, or that the prosthetic nose on his face is helping him transform into a character that shows no sign of deviation from most of what Wahlberg has done as a performer. In the rare case of defense for Wahlberg’s acting choices over the past few decades, at least he understands what the film needs, offering a nice balance to Mateen’s straight man having to suffer in silence. This leads to contentious moments where Wayne, for the most part, surrenders his strength as a man to the powers that be, while a blissfully ignorant Gregory keeps his privilege to do what he wants because of the power granted to him by Uncle Sam.
Mateen and Wahlberg are good together on screen because that’s when “By Any Means” is most interesting, compared to when the film focuses on their own lives. The screenplay has a knack for piquing the audience’s interest in certain storylines involving many of the wonderful supporting actors, only to drop them instantly or present them in an unriveting way. Bratton has plenty to explore in the bureaucratic systems David Strathairn’s character navigates, with Gregory’s power checked as he himself is held in check by the Feds within his position in Joe Columbo’s crew, or even Nichole Beharie’s character stepping up to the plate behind being a dutiful spouse. Instead, he opts for a more straightforward picture that says far less than it should.
Bratton’s sensibility as a filmmaker doesn’t lend itself to the film’s more action-oriented sequences. He struggles technically, whether it’s the unmemorable shootouts (including an awkwardly inserted first-person POV shot down the barrel of a gun), an indecipherable car chase, or fist fights that feel devoid of any real, palpable tension. All of which is drowned out by Terrance Blanchard’s score, which is far from some of the best work he’s done in recent memory. “By Any Means” is the exact type of film it’s been marketed to be. Audiences will show out to watch Wahlberg drive a bat through a racist Hillbilly’s kneecaps more so than Bratton trying to expound on the dark road of where violence leads us, especially as an answer to these insurmountable systems that subject us.
