By Any Means

I suppose the appeal of By Any Means is watching unrepentant, homicidal racists get beaten and tortured by a white mafia enforcer and a black FBI agent. The “a taste of their own medicine” thing. But, really, watching Special Agent Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) having his principles gradually eroded until he’s no better than mob hitman Greg Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg) is a dispiriting experience that tarnishes the entire narrative of the 1960s Civil Rights movement in the quest to create a “fact-based” action film.

Let’s deal with this “fact-based” thing upfront. The publicity plot summary for By Any Means reads, in part, “Based on a true 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.”

This is a load of hooey. Strider, the “young Black FBI agent,” is entirely fictional, and even within the context of the movie, he is not “sent into 1960s Mississippi” — he’s already there. A native of Hattiesburg, where the film is set, Strider has returned to Mississippi from Chicago with his northern-born wife, Allison (Nicole Beharie), to take a desk job in the Jackson FBI office. He is not sent to investigate the killings, but is merely ordered to escort Scarpa while the enforcer tortures witnesses in the hope that they will sign detailed confessions.

The possibly “true” part of the story is that Scarpa, a real-life killer who was reportedly an FBI confidential informant, was twice sent by the bureau to strong-arm participants in racist hate crimes — a story shared by Scarpa’s mistress and grown son (also a mafioso) but never confirmed by the FBI. So the movie’s first scene, in which Scarpa tortures a source until he reveals the location of the bodies of three murdered Civil Rights activists in 1964, is based on a possibly true story. A competing account credits a different source for revealing the burial site, however, so believe what you like.

Whether Scarpa went to Mississippi a second time, in 1966, and what he might have done there, is pure speculation, meaning that the only verifiably “true” portion of the rest of the movie is the text of final title cards explaining the fate of the Ku Klux Klansmen who murdered voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer (Giancarlo Esposito) by firebombing his home. The screenplay, by Sascha Penn (a contributor to Creed II) is chiefly a fiction, cooked up, as the publicity summary states, to blur “justice and vengeance.”

But By Any Means is just one long moral morass. It doesn’t weigh the cost of justice so much as assert that brutality is effectively countered only with more-powerful brutality. Strider’s one attempt actually to investigate Dahmer’s death by interviewing a witness has a tragic outcome that the movie reveals then drops, without ever exploring the impact on Strider. If there’s any through-line amid the burnings, gun battles, and fist fights — including one between Strider and Scarpa, of course — it’s Strider’s gradual slide into Scarpa’s ethical cesspool. But since it’s a decline without consequences or introspection, Strider remains a rather opaque character, serving chiefly as the plot device he was invented to be. Since the filmmakers have no clear vision of Strider’s inner life, Abdul-Mateen is powerless to give him the substance he needs.

Wahlberg, bulked up and wearing distracting facial prosthetics — as if anyone in the audience would know how well he resembled the real Scarpa — tries to make Scarpa jolly and likable while simultaneous portraying him as sadistic and detached from any morality. As a result, he’s just ridiculous. The only player who leaves a sympathetic impression is Esposito, whose time onscreen is brief. Reliable character actors David Strathairn and Josh Lucas play stock FBI officials, presumably thinking the movie would turn out better than it did.

Director Elegance Bratton made one impressive previous feature, The Inspection (2022), about homophobia in a Marine Corps boot camp, but he has nothing substantial to work with here. Characters are introduced and dropped; consequences are essentially nonexistent; plot threads (such as Allison’s budding activism) are inserted and abandoned. (One question among many: If Strider grew up in Hattiesburg, why does he seem to have no friends or relatives?) Except for whatever joy moviegoers can derive from seeing racists beaten and killed, the movie has no substance to offer.

By Any Means lists more producers and production companies than speaking roles, a laundry list that suggests a long, rocky road to its production — and a lot of distrust in the material. A long history of competing agendas and visions likely explains the film’s failure both to make a coherent moral statement of any kind and to tell an engaging story. Its “fact-based” self-defense has also become a flashpoint, as the murdered Dahmer’s son has branded the film “an absolute lie.” The son contends that the FBI solved Dahmer’s murder through old-fashioned investigating, including a lot of evidence found at the scene that’s left out of the movie, with no help from Scarpa. Enough said.

Grade: F. Rated R. Now playing at AMC River Hills 10, Carolina Cinemark, and Regal Biltmore Grande.

(Photo: Paramount Pictures)