By Any Means begins with a premise that sounds almost too neatly engineered for a studio thriller: a Black FBI agent in 1960s Mississippi is forced to work alongside a New York Mafia hitman while investigating racist violence tied to the Ku Klux Klan. Elegance Bratton’s film is inspired by historical events surrounding the murder of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer and the strange relationship between organized crime and federal law enforcement, but it does not approach that material with the distance of a procedural. The movie wants anger, momentum and the ugly satisfaction of seeing violent men discover that someone more violent has arrived.
That creates the film’s central tension before the characters even meet. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Wayne Strider, a fictionalized FBI agent who believes in the possibility of justice from inside an institution that repeatedly demonstrates how selective that justice can be. Mark Wahlberg plays Gregory Scarpa as his opposite: all swagger, impulse and practical brutality, a man whose usefulness depends on his willingness to cross lines the Bureau cannot acknowledge crossing itself. Bratton spends much of the movie forcing those two philosophies into the same car, interrogation room and investigation.
Abdul-Mateen gives By Any Means its center of gravity. Strider could have become a familiar righteous-lawman figure, but the performance is more guarded than that. He enters Mississippi with a belief in procedure that is not naïve so much as necessary; if he stops believing the rules can work, he has to confront what it means to be serving an institution that has rarely protected people who look like him. Abdul-Mateen plays that conflict internally until the movie begins giving him reasons to make it external. His anger grows without turning into a switch the screenplay simply flips for the final act.
Wahlberg is operating in a much louder register. Scarpa arrives with tinted glasses, a thick accent, a suspiciously immaculate sense of his own authority and a willingness to use a baseball bat as a negotiating tool. The performance is deliberately broad, at times so broad that it seems to have wandered in from a different film. That mismatch is partly the point. Scarpa is an outsider to both Strider’s world and the racial order of Mississippi, and Bratton uses his indifference to respectable procedure as a kind of destabilizing force. The problem is that the film cannot always decide whether Scarpa is frightening, funny, cathartic or absurd, and Wahlberg happily plays all four at once.
When the tonal collision works, By Any Means has real charge. Bratton stages confrontations with an exploitation-film bluntness that makes the film feel less interested in tasteful historical reconstruction than in the moral ugliness of institutions deciding when violence is legitimate. The movie repeatedly asks what happens when law enforcement quietly borrows the methods of the people it claims to oppose. It is not a subtle question, and the screenplay rarely pretends otherwise. The title itself is a declaration of intent.
The more serious historical material is less consistently handled. Vernon Dahmer’s murder is not simply a plot device, and the film knows that, but it sometimes struggles to balance the real pain surrounding its subject with the entertainment value of unleashing Scarpa on white supremacists. Giancarlo Esposito brings immediate weight to limited screen time, while Nicole Beharie is asked to do too much with too little as Strider’s wife. Her scenes suggest a richer domestic perspective on the risks he is taking, but the film repeatedly leaves that perspective behind to return to the central partnership.
That partnership is entertaining enough to explain why the movie keeps doing it. Abdul-Mateen and Wahlberg have an effective push-pull rhythm, one actor tightening a scene while the other tries to blow it open. Their best moments are not the speeches about justice but the smaller exchanges where they recognize exactly how little they like one another and how useful the other man has become. The film has the bones of an old-fashioned mismatched-cop thriller buried inside a much heavier story, and Bratton is often at his most confident when he stops apologizing for that structure.
The final stretch becomes louder, bloodier and less disciplined, but it also commits to the movie’s anger. By Any Means never fully reconciles its desire to honor historical trauma with its appetite for pulp revenge. A cleaner film might have solved that contradiction. It also might have been less interesting. Bratton’s movie is messy because the modes do not naturally fit together, and the friction between them produces both its strongest moments and its biggest weaknesses.
