Joel on Film

In theory, the central relationship in By Any Means is a wellspring of fascination, from its dynamic, to the reason for its existence, to the ways it both upends and levels expectations. One man is an FBI agent—not the first Black man to be one, but probably among the first dozen or so, simply by virtue of this being the mid-1960s and set during a time of social upheaval in the wake of some prominent, very public racial violence. The other is a hitman for the New York City mafia, and it’s this character, the very real and quite infamous Greg Scarpa, who is easily the most interesting character in Sascha Penn’s screenplay.

Scarpa is played by Mark Wahlberg in a fascinating performance that’s surprisingly hard-to-read, given that the man himself is pretty straightforward in his ideology. More specifically, he doesn’t really seem to have one, which one supposes is an important quality when Scarpa is sent to be a federally endorsed enforcer to find out who has killed a major civil rights activist. He doesn’t particularly care for “you people,” as he tells the Black man with whom he’s been partnered, but he’s also ruthless, brutally efficient, a bit of a wild card and, well, strangely loyal to the mission at hand for no reason other than he’s being paid for it.

In other words, this is a brute, neutralizing force and, perhaps, precisely the kind of energy needed to get answers from the white-power nationalists of the South who were either directly or indirectly involved with the murder of Vernon Dahmer (played by Giancarlo Esposito in the film’s opening sequences). The man is just as willing to beat some very bad men to a pulp and prepare them for a bit of the old sexual humiliation as he is to kill a racist cop for slowing them down. No person, no language, and no twisted ideals faze this guy, and Wahlberg is really something else—for lack of a better or any other phrase—behind a fake bulbous nose and through an omnipresent toothpick.

As for the movie around him, it’s sort of a by-the-numbers historical drama, melded with an inelegant revenge thriller that, ultimately, sides with the latter in terms of both its stakes and its significance. It begins urgently, with that murder of Dahmer and the initial pairing of Scarpa with Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), the Black FBI agent in question. Strider’s wife (played by Nicole Beharie) wants safer postings for her husband, but as he has a personal connection to all the racial strife and tension and violence, that’s simply out of the question.

Abdul-Mateen is quite good, too, as a man who refuses to allow his righteous anger by tempered—too much, at least—by his professional priorities, although those are often needled a bit by his bosses and contemporaries at the Bureau (represented by David Strathairn and Josh Lucas in key, if underwritten, roles) treating him with either subtle condescension or polite contempt. Indeed, much of Strider’s good will is tied to how the Dahmer investigation turns out, and he’s given specific orders to allow Scarpa to operate unimpeded. At first, that’s a bit of a difficult task.

After all, and once again, there’s Scarpa’s psychotic love of turning any minor impediment into brutal, often irrevocable violence with which to contend. The plot is a straightforward procedural, as the pair investigate and interrogate leads, while having to deal with the uncooperative locals—to include the cops, of course, all of whom believe Strider’s badge to be fake. When the fight turns more personal for Strider, though—following an attack on his own house and that of a kindly witness played by LisaGay Hamilton—the movie becomes an entirely different kind of familiar and routine.

It all becomes entirely personal, leading to a climax which neither Penn nor director Elegance Bratton seems to know how to reckon with in the wake of what the story had been until that moment—complete with a shootout, a torture session that marks a turning point for how we view Strider, and the general air of many, many storytelling liberties having been applied to this whole thing. The coda of By Any Means reveals that the person we’ve come to know as Strider was an unnamed FBI agent, and that fact sort of ties together the flat execution of bigger ambitions at play here.

Rating: ** (out of ****)