Mark Wahlberg (left) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in 'By Any Means.' Paramount Pictures In the first proper scene of By Any Means, the new picture by Elegance Bratton (The Inspection), a musclebound thug (Mark Wahlberg) looms over a man tied to a chair. The latter pleads and screams, his cries echoing through the empty warehouse; the former responds by beating him harder still with his baseball bat.
It’s a scene that plays like a thousand we’ve seen before, in a thousand other crime drama — or it would, if not for the preceding prologue. By Any Means actually opens with a black-and-white montage of news footage about the disappearance of three civil rights activists in 1964 Mississippi. Wahlberg’s Scarpa isn’t thrashing the man over some run-of-the-mill gangland dispute; he’s torturing him for intel on the whereabouts of the victims’ bodies.
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By Any Means
The Bottom Line An odd combo doesn't always make a successful one. Release date: Friday, Sept. 4 Cast: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Mark Wahlberg, Nicole Beharie, Giancarlo Esposito, Josh Lucas, LisaGay Hamilton, LaChanze, Ethan Embry, David Strathairn Director: Elegance Bratton Screenwriter: Sascha Penn Rated R, 1 hour 47 minutesIn that light, the interrogation sequence takes on unexpected thematic resonance, teasing something richer and knottier than your run-of-the-mill potboiler. But the marriage of familiar story beats and less familiar history proves an awkward and uneasy one — albeit one still capable, here and there, of producing nasty thrills.
Sascha Penn bases his Black List script on the somewhat true story of the unlikely and initially unwilling partnership between Gregory Scarpa, a real-life Brooklyn hitman with his own Wikipedia page and everything, and Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Matteen II), a fictionalized Black FBI agent. Strider is by no means the first of his kind, as he’s always quick to point out, but he’s still enough of a rarity that Scarpa’s nickname for Strider is “Jackie Robinson.”
Strider is an idealist who was inspired to join the Bureau in the first place because, he says, “I believe in justice, and I believe Negroes have to be a part in getting it” — which only makes him more frustrated that the agency seems completely uninterested in serving the Black community. (That’s putting it lightly: The film makes no reference at all to the fact that around this time, the FBI was actively surveilling and sabotaging prominent civil rights figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Fred Hampton.)
But an exception is made in January 1966, when members of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter firebomb the home of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer (Giancarlo Esposito, striking in a brief role). Incensed by the blatant disregard for his recently signed Voting Rights Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson demands someone answer for the murder. The very next day, Mississippi chief Roy (David Strathairn) summons Scarpa, an off-the-books associate willing to do the dirty work the FBI won’t, and assigns Strider to act as his handler.
Their relationship is not immediately a harmonious one. Where Strider is cautious and by-the-book, Scarpa is casually violent and confident in his own untouchability. Where Strider, a born-and-raised local who knows too well how little protection even his FBI badge provides him, gives white bigots a wide berth, the Italian American Scarpa declares that were he a Black man surrounded by racist hillbillies, he’d “kill ’em all, every last one.”
Where Strider carries a copy of King’s Why We Can’t Wait in his car, Scarpa expresses his admiration for Malcolm X — not so much for the man’s racial politics, which he’s indifferent to, as for the take-no-shit attitude that gives this film its title.
But the longer Strider is stuck with Scarpa, the more Strider comes around to Scarpa’s vicious methods. Call it a reverse Green Book: Rather than the uncouth white man being edified by the classy Black one, By All Means offers the straightlaced Black man being taught to play dirty by a white brute.
It is, in its way, sickly gratifying. In a world where justice is still too hard to come by for victims of racist violence, there’s a dark but undeniable satisfaction in watching a sadistic cop unceremoniously gunned down in the street, or a Klansman who’d threatened to hang Strider from a bridge find himself begging Strider not to hang him off a bridge — and particularly when the various beatdowns, shootouts and car chases are shot so crisply, and backdropped so elegantly by Terence Blanchard’s smoky jazz score.
While the constitutionally Bostonian Wahlberg seems somewhat miscast as such a Brooklyn gangster archetype (to say nothing of the checkered if distant personal history that makes him an especially odd choice for a film about battling racists), the rapport that emerges between Scarpa and Strider is interestingly prickly. Abdul-Mateen is so reliably magnetic that he makes you believe fully in both Strider’s inherent decency — most palpable in scenes with his wife (Nicole Beharie, trying and almost succeeding at elevating a nothing role) — and his increasing tolerance for Scarpa’s brand of ugliness.
Abdul-Mateen is so good, in fact, that it takes a moment to notice how little Penn’s script is doing to square the two sides of the character. Strider’s arc would seem to be that of an antihero or at least a very conflicted hero, as he increasingly crosses legal and moral lines in his pursuit of a greater good.
Instead, By All Means offers the seductive but queasy fantasy of a violence that makes no mark on the soul at all. It does so by painting Strider as hopelessly naïve — too deferential to white institutions that dismiss or demean him, too rulebound to do what really needs to be done in such an ugly world — and Scarpa’s brutality as empirically correct.
It’s Scarpa’s stomach for savagery that saves Strider when he’s threatened by a gun-toting witness or an angry mob, and that yields the answers polite questioning cannot. It’s only once Strider starts to indulge in a bit of bloodshed himself that he starts to get the respect he’s due and the results he’s after. By framing violence as the only solution, the movie lets Strider off the hook for engaging in it, and us by extension for enjoying it.
But it’s an equilibrium that can only hold for as long as the film declines to engage with Strider as a three-dimensional character — one who might be transformed by his walk in the shadows, who might come out the other end of it with a changed understanding of his moral code or the movement he’s trying to protect or the community he’s surrounded by — rather than a two-dimensional avenging angel, compelled to extract vengeance for our viewing pleasure. The latter framing makes By Any Means, in its way, gripping. It doesn’t make it particularly deep, or ultimately very satisfying.
Full credits
Distributor: Paramount Pictures Production companies: Hammerstone Studios, Thunder Road Films, Freedom Principle Productions, Ballpoint Productions, Municipal Pictures Cast: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Mark Wahlberg, Nicole Beharie, Josh Lucas, LisaGay Hamilton, LaChanze, Ethan Embry, David Strathairn, Giancarlo Esposito Director: Elegance Bratton Screenwriter: Sascha Penn Producers: Alex Lebovici, Chester Algernal Gordon, Elegance Bratton, Basil Iwanyk, Erica Lee, Mark Wahlberg, Stephen Levinson Executive producers: David Goldman, Brent Guttman, Mark Carmer, Christopher Tremann, Petr Jákl, Lee Broda, Jeff Rice, Adam Kolbrenner, Sascha Penn, Wayne Marc Godfrey, Nicki Cortese, Chase Vergari, Gianni Benvenuto, Ibrahim Mohammed, Yasmyne Mohammed, Logan Coles, Jonathan Miller, Rob McGllivray, Mark Holder, Christine Holder, Richie Walls, Brando Eaton, Gregg Davis, Phillip Schenkler, Kevin G. Lee, Jesse Fox, Dorit L. Hakim-Kramer, Lee Shira, Jonathan Oakes, Walter Josten, Patrick Josten, Brian Keefe, Kim Atwood Cleworth, Atty Cleworth, Victor Moyers, Michael Rothstein, Samuel Hall, Warren Goz Director of photography: Ante Cheng Production designer: Tommy Love Costume designer: Derica Cole Washington Editor: Kristan Sprague Music: Terence Blanchard Casting director: Kim Coleman Rated R, 1 hour 47 minutesTHR Newsletters
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