 |
| TRAILER |
Elegance Bratton’s By Any Means arrives with the kind of premise that can sell a movie before the first frame rolls: a Black FBI agent in 1966 Mississippi is assigned to investigate the murder of civil-rights leader Vernon Dahmer, only to find himself partnered with Gregory Scarpa, a Brooklyn Mafia hitman secretly working as a government informant. It is an irresistible collision of genres and moral contradictions — civil-rights drama meets crime thriller, procedural meets vigilante movie, historical fact filtered through the machinery of contemporary action cinema. The trouble is that Bratton’s film contains several movies inside that premise, and they do not always pull in the same direction.
Set primarily in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, By Any Means takes as its historical starting point the 1966 murder of Dahmer (Giancarlo Esposito), the Black businessman, NAACP leader and voting-rights activist who had pledged to pay the poll tax for local Black citizens unable to afford it. His commitment was straightforward: if the law nominally guaranteed Black Americans the right to vote, then economic intimidation could not be allowed to turn that right into an abstraction. The Ku Klux Klan answered with terror, firebombing Dahmer’s home and killing him. Bratton understands the elemental power of the story. This is not merely a murder mystery. It is a story about the machinery surrounding the murder — the intimidation, institutional indifference and racial hierarchy that made such violence possible.
That distinction is crucial because the film is not particularly interested in the conventional whodunit. The killers are not mysterious in the ordinary thriller sense. The mystery is institutional: How could a man be murdered for trying to help Black citizens vote, and how could the machinery of American law be so inadequate to protect him? The FBI's answer, in Bratton’s telling, is extraordinary. When local witnesses prove too frightened, compromised or hostile to cooperate, the bureau brings in Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg), a notorious mobster whose willingness to employ violence gives the government a weapon it cannot officially admit to possessing.
It is a terrific movie premise. It is also the kind of premise that comes with a dangerous gravitational pull. Once Scarpa enters the picture, the film becomes increasingly fascinated by what he can do.
Wahlberg plays Scarpa as a swaggering, amoral problem solver, and the casting is plainly designed to give the movie commercial voltage. The actor’s familiar screen persona — cocky, physical, streetwise — is repurposed here for a darker historical setting, with a distracting prosthetic nose adding another layer of transformation. Scarpa is introduced as a man who does not merely threaten violence but treats it as a practical technology. In the film’s opening, he tortures a white man to extract information, establishing the character’s operating principle before the story has even introduced its more conventional hero.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II provides the necessary counterweight as Wayne Strider, a Black FBI agent returning to his native Mississippi after working in Chicago. Strider is a composite character rather than a historical individual, and the fictionalization gives Bratton room to make him the audience’s moral and emotional entry point. Unfortunately, the screenplay by Sascha Penn does not give Abdul-Mateen enough interior material to work with. The actor communicates Strider’s restraint and mounting frustration largely through physical control — the clenched jaw, the wary stare, the pauses before answering — but the character remains more functional than fully dimensional.
That is especially frustrating because Strider's predicament is potentially the film’s richest dramatic asset. He is a federal agent whose own authority is questioned because he is Black. He works for an institution that has the power to investigate racial violence but has not necessarily demonstrated the will to do so. His superior, Roy K. Moore (David Strathairn), keeps Black agents away from civil-rights investigations until political pressure makes the Dahmer case impossible to ignore. Strider is therefore caught inside a contradiction that should generate an entire movie on its own: he believes in the law while watching the law fail the people it is supposed to protect.
Instead, the movie increasingly asks Scarpa to teach him how to fight back. The partnership gets its most efficient expression during an early roadside confrontation. A white police officer stops Strider and Scarpa, refuses to accept Strider’s FBI credentials and assaults him. When the officer is about to shoot Strider, Scarpa kills him. Strider is horrified. “You shot a cop,” he protests. Scarpa replies, “No, he’s fucked.” The exchange is crude, funny and revealing. It establishes the film’s governing distinction between legality and justice. Scarpa understands immediately what Strider is still resisting: in this particular landscape, the badge may represent the law without necessarily providing its protection.
From there, By Any Means becomes a conversion story. Strider begins as a believer in institutional procedure and gradually embraces Scarpa’s more ruthless methods. The shift is framed through one of the film’s central ideological tensions — Martin Luther King Jr.’s commitment to nonviolence versus Malcolm X’s insistence on achieving freedom “by any means necessary.” Strider keeps King’s Why We Can’t Wait in his car. Scarpa invokes Malcolm X. The gangster tells Strider what he would do to the men terrorizing Black communities: kill them all. Strider, initially appalled, wants the killers put in prison. The problem is not the argument itself. The problem is how quickly the movie turns that argument into action-movie propulsion.
Bratton, whose previous feature The Inspection established him as a filmmaker interested in the relationship between institutions and bodies, clearly wants By Any Means to be both a political film and a muscular genre picture. The visual upgrade is immediately apparent. Mississippi is rendered in rich, sun-saturated colors, with warm interiors and lush landscapes that depart from the grim, desaturated palette often associated with historical films about the South. The effect is smart: Bratton does not make Mississippi look like a haunted museum of racism. He makes it look alive, beautiful and ordinary, which makes the violence feel more invasive.
But the film’s action vocabulary is considerably less assured. Several fight sequences have the unmistakable quality of choreography being performed rather than violence being experienced. Actors sometimes appear to wait for the next blow; impacts lack weight; reactions arrive a fraction too late. Instead of disappearing into the scene, the mechanics become visible. You can catch the performance — the punch being thrown, the body anticipating the hit — and suddenly the historical reality evaporates. The response is not fear or outrage but a distracted, almost involuntary: What was that? For a film so invested in violence as a social system, that is a significant weakness. Physical credibility matters. When violence looks synthetic, the political argument attached to it loses some of its force.
Bratton compounds the problem with an occasional first-person-shooter perspective that suddenly makes the film resemble Call of Duty. The choice feels imported from another movie, one more interested in immersion and kinetic sensation than historical consequence. There are moments when By Any Means seems unsure whether it wants audiences to recoil from violence or enjoy the visceral rush of watching Scarpa dispense it. The answer, too often, is both.
That contradiction extends to the film’s treatment of brutality. Bratton does not soften the history. Dahmer’s death is presented with punishing directness, including a prolonged image of him burning after his home is attacked. Torture scenes involve baseball bats, blood, pistol-whipping and the threat of sexual violence. Racial slurs are deployed with deliberately unpleasant frequency. The movie wants the audience to understand that racial terror was physical, intimate and sustained.
There is value in that refusal to sanitize. But graphic representation is not automatically the same thing as dramatic understanding. At times the film risks turning historical suffering into an escalation chart: the next attack must be worse, the next confrontation bloodier, the next threat more explicit. The result can feel less like history pressing upon the characters than like a thriller continuously raising its stakes.
The irony is that the movie does not need to exaggerate its history to make it shocking. Vernon Dahmer’s story is already extraordinary. The fact that he was targeted because he wanted Black citizens to vote is enough. The fact that the FBI reportedly relied on a Mafia informant because conventional investigation had become so difficult is enough. The tension between federal authority and local racial terror is enough. The film’s most effective moments understand this and allow historical reality to carry the drama.
A scene in which Scarpa calls Strider the FBI’s Jackie Robinson is particularly telling. Rather than accepting the compliment, Strider corrects him by naming Black FBI agents who preceded him, including James Wormley Jones, widely regarded as the bureau’s first Black agent. It is a small exchange, but it gives Strider something the screenplay too often withholds: intellectual agency. He is not merely a man being radicalized by a white gangster. He is someone who already knows the history of the institution he serves.
That missing dimension becomes most apparent in the treatment of Nicole Beharie’s Allison, Strider’s wife and a community figure in her own right. Beharie brings intelligence and warmth to a role that could have become the movie’s emotional conscience, yet the screenplay repeatedly sidelines her in favor of the Strider-Scarpa partnership. The result is a narrowing of the story. A movie ostensibly about a community under siege becomes, increasingly, a two-hander about men debating and deploying violence.
This is where By Any Means occasionally brushes against the limitations of the contemporary prestige action movie. The film wants to critique institutions, but it also wants the pleasures those institutions normally provide genre protagonists: weapons, secret missions, dangerous roads, tough-guy banter and extralegal retaliation. It wants Scarpa to be morally repulsive and dramatically irresistible. It wants Strider to preserve his principles while becoming increasingly willing to abandon them. It is an unstable combination.
The historical liberties also require careful handling. The real Scarpa existed; Strider did not. The FBI’s alleged relationship with Scarpa has been reported but not officially acknowledged by the bureau. And the film invents or alters events for dramatic purposes, including threats against Vernon Dahmer’s wife, Ellie. Those changes are defensible only if the fictionalization produces a deeper truth. Bratton has explicitly positioned the movie not as history but as a contemporary commentary using history as its raw material. That is a legitimate artistic strategy, but it means the movie must be judged not simply by what happened in 1966 but by what its inventions reveal about the present. Sometimes they reveal something sharply. Sometimes they merely make the movie louder.
The film’s most haunting contemporary resonance may actually be found in its depiction of the federal government. By Any Means portrays an America in which Washington, however imperfectly, ultimately regards racial terror as a challenge to federal authority. Lyndon B. Johnson is invoked as a president unwilling to allow local officials and vigilantes to make a mockery of civil-rights legislation. There is something almost melancholy about this vision now. The movie accidentally becomes a period piece not only because of its cars, costumes and segregation signs, but because it depicts a government that still believes the enforcement of civil rights is part of its institutional responsibility. That gives By Any Means a surprising emotional dimension. Its nostalgia is not for Mississippi in 1966 — there is nothing nostalgic about the terror the film depicts — but for the possibility that the federal government might regard justice as an obligation rather than an inconvenience.
Bratton deserves credit for making a film willing to wrestle with that contradiction. By Any Means is not a comfortable history lesson, nor is it a conventional cop thriller. It is an ambitious attempt to fuse the moral seriousness of a civil-rights drama with the propulsion of a contemporary crime picture. When those impulses align, the result is electric: Abdul-Mateen’s contained intensity, Wahlberg’s unapologetic menace, the gorgeous Southern cinematography and the disturbing premise create a movie with genuine commercial and cultural hooks. When they collide, however, the seams show. The action can become awkward. The dialogue can over explain. Symbolic details are sometimes repeated until the film seems nervous that audiences have missed the point. The first-person-shooter sequence feels like a marketing idea looking for a movie. The score leans heavily into emotional instruction. And the screenplay's insistence on Strider's transformation through Scarpa deprives the protagonist of some of the interiority that could have made that transformation genuinely tragic.
Still, there is something admirable about a movie willing to make its audience uncomfortable with the question of what justice looks like when the law has failed. By Any Means does not arrive with the formal polish of a fully controlled prestige thriller, but its ambition is unmistakable. Bratton is trying to make history combustible rather than embalmed, and he is unwilling to pretend that the American past can be confronted without confronting the violence that sustained it.
The film's central phrase consequently remains less a slogan than a warning. “By any means” can mean determination, resistance and survival. It can also mean the moment when righteous anger begins to erase the distinction between justice and vengeance. Bratton's film is most compelling when it refuses to tell us exactly where that line lies. It is least convincing when its action machinery tries to answer the question for him.
For audiences, the film should prove divisive. Viewers drawn to the historical subject will find much to engage with; action audiences may appreciate its hard-edged premise but could be distracted by uneven execution. For Bratton, the movie represents an ambitious step outward from the intimate institutional drama of The Inspection into a broader, more commercial filmmaking arena. The result is messy, forceful and sometimes frustrating — but rarely anonymous.
And perhaps that is the most consequential thing about By Any Means. It refuses to let Vernon Dahmer remain a footnote. It takes an episode of American history in which the right to vote was defended at the cost of a man's life and turns it into a question about the price of justice itself. The movie does not always know how to dramatize that question with the precision it deserves. But it knows the question is still waiting for an answer.
No comments:
Post a Comment