I appear on “CTV News at 11:30” with anchor Andria Case to talk about the weekend’s best movies and shows including the FBI period drama “By Any Means” and the violent actioner “Onslaught.”Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 12:19)
I join “CTV News Toronto at Five” with anchor Zuraidah Alman to talk about the stylish and satirical “Onslaught,” the big stars of “Mayday” and the vengeance of “By Any Means.”Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 14:08)
I join CTV NewsChannel anchor Renée Rodgers to talk about the stylish and satirical “Onslaught,” the big stars of “Mayday” and the vengeance of “By Any Means.”Watch the whole thing HERE!
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Watch the whole thing HERE!
CAST: Mark Wahlberg, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Nicole Beharie, Josh Lucas, LisaGay Hamilton, LaChanze, Ethan Embry, David Strathairn, Giancarlo Esposito. Directed by Elegance Bratton.
REVIEW: Set in 1966, and loosely based on real life FBI agent Lindley DeVecchio, “By Any Means” sees Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a by-the-book FBI Agent who passionately believes in Civil Rights for Black people, desk bound in his bureau’s file department. “America won’t be right until Mississippi is right,” he says.
When a prominent Black voting rights advocate is murdered by the Klan the FBI runs into a wall of silence from witnesses who fear retribution from the KKK.
With no witnesses willing to speak, the Agency takes the drastic action of pairing the Mississippi-born Strider with a man “uniquely qualified for the job,” the Colombo family hitman and FBI informant Gregory Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg, playing a character based on a real-life hitman for the Colombo crime family of New York City). “I do whatever I want,” he says. “No rules.”
They are a classic odd couple, forced to form an uneasy alliance. Strider is led by morality and a belief in justice. Scarpa, on the other hand, is a violent psychopath, whose actions are condoned by the FBI as long as they yield results. He believes in nothing but himself.
“I knock some heads around and crack the case,” says Scarpa. “Making people disappear does not solve the problem,” says Strider.
Doling out justice and vengeance in almost equal measure, Strider and Scarpa’s antics bring a morally ambiguous tone to “By Any Means.”
It’s a sort of Good Cop/Really Bad Cop scenario that, for all its talk of doing the right thing and playing by the rules, plays like a historical riff on “Death Wish’s” orgy of retribution.
If there is an ethical cost of Scarpa’s actions—torture and beating confessions out of suspects—it’s one the movie isn’t keen to explore. Scarpa’s coercive violence yields results but his methods are justified rather than questioned. Stride doesn’t like it but, after a spell of feeling helpless when his commitment to law and order fails him, eventually tacitly agrees that a cigarette burn to the chest or a baseball bat applied to the kneecaps are powerful tools in coaxing folks to spill the beans. But with no complexity to the film’s study of the ends justifying the means the effectiveness of the message is blunted. There is a cathartic vibe to seeing the Klansmen get knocked around, but it is a visceral thrill, not an intellectual one.
“By Any Means” is a handsome looking movie, with stylish direction from Elegance Bratton and a powerful performance from Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. He’s as stoic as Wahlberg, decked out with a giant Spirit of Halloween fake nose and elaborate combover, is swaggerlicious.
“By Any Means” is an entertaining late summer crime drama, but in its treatment of morality is more wish-fulfillment revenge than treatise on systemic complicity in illegal and methods used in law enforcement.
“Blindspotting,” the debut film from director Carlos Lopez Estrada, filters an essay on privilege, gentrification and violence through the lens of one relationship. Colin (Daveed Diggs) and Miles (Rafael Casal) have been friends since childhood but still have much to learn from one another.
Set in Oakland, California the bulk of the action takes place over the course of Colin’s last three days of probation on an assault and battery charge. Living in a halfway house, Colin works as a mover, with best friend Miles, for his ex-girlfriend Val (Janina Gavankar) and has a strict curfew of 11 pm. He’s trying desperately to stay out of trouble but Miles, a loudmouth who carries a gun, is a loose cannon, always on the edge of blowing up the situation. When Colin witnesses a cop shoot an unarmed African-American man in the back he’s plagued by nightmares and an increasing sense of trauma and dread. A situation at a party that escalates out of control forces Colin to assess his place in the world, or at least, his place in a rapidly gentrifying Oakland.
“Blindspotting” is a happily undisciplined a movie. Raw and brimming with ideas, it’s an exciting look at contemporary life that kicks preconceive notions of storytelling to the curb. Co-writers and co-stars Diggs and Casal weave a story that bristles with provactive ideas. Funny one moment, tragic the next, it confronts the viewers ideas not only on the narrative form of the storytelling but the stereotypes so often used to portray people of colour in movies.
Director Estrada builds tension all the way through leading up to a surreal showdown that brings the story into sharp focus.
Despite many stylish flourishes “Blindspotting” feels authentic. Perhaps it’s because of the warm camaraderie between Diggs and Casal or perhaps it’s because of the sense of nuance given to large scale issues of race, loyalty and class.
