BY ANY MEANS: 2 ½ STARS. ” A PLAY ON THE Good Cop/Really Bad Cop scenario.”
SYNOPSIS: In “By Any Means,” a new crime thriller starring Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and now playing in theatres, a mafia hitman and a young FBI agent reluctantly team to investigate murders targeting civil rights leaders in 1966 Mississippi. “I believe in justice,” says Special FBI Agent Wayne Strider, “by any means necessary.”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.
