Elegance Bratton‘s “By Any Means” sits discomfitingly between exploitation picture and sober-eyed historical race drama, and can’t quite find a clear path to either. Granted, that kind of dissonance is baked into the premise, which mines a genuinely baffling true-crime story for something more profound, but merely grasps at air.
The tale in question is that of Gregory Scarpa, Jr. (Mark Wahlberg), a New York mafioso who, in real life, carried the moniker of the “Grim Reaper,” and allegedly killed more than 50 guys over the course of his career as a hitman. Now, behind the scenes, he also worked as an FBI informant and was apparently the guy they sent down to help investigate murders of civil rights workers in Mississippi; that invariably led to cracking a few Klansmen’s heads along the way. In Sascha Penn’s script, at least, while Scarpa has no great love for Black people, he respects the winner-take-all approach of Malcolm X to the peace-loving principles of Martin Luther King, Jr. “By any means” is a phrase he borrows from Malcolm, and each word hammers on the screen in the film’s opening minutes in time with Scarpa swinging a bat at a Klan witness’s knees.
That opening scene, which takes place two years before the meat of the film, feels like “By Any Means”‘ central appeal in microcosm: As pacifistic, well-meaning, liberal-minded audiences, wouldn’t we still love to gawk at the visceral thrills of watching bad guys get clobbered by a foul-mouthed goombah who relishes violence? As Scarpa, Wahlberg plays him somewhere between his role in “The Departed” and Tony Clifton: He’s decked out in muscle-hugging A-shirts, high-waisted ’60s slacks, and a head covered by a feathered ‘do, flashy shades he wears everywhere, and a prosthetic nose that perpetually gives him the air of the ridiculous. Setting this kind of guy loose on the kinds of folks we never have to feel sympathy for (white supremacists) is what fuels the rage machine at the heart of Bratton’s film. And when it leans into that register, it’s kind of fun.
Problem is, “By Any Means” gestures at the ethics of such state-sanctioned overreach, trying to turn such a (pardon me) black-and-white conflict into something approaching nuance. This comes in the form of the case (it’s 1966, and an NAACP chapter president, played by Giancarlo Esposito, has been murdered in cold blood by a group of Klansmen who burn both a cross and his house down) and the protagonist: Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a fresh-faced FBI agent recently moved back down to his home state of Mississippi from a life in Chicago, bringing his cosmopolitan wife (Nicole Beharie, who does yeoman’s work with very little, a trend for women in this film) alongside. “I believe in justice,” he tells his immediate superiors (David Strathairn, Josh Lucas) when asked why he joined the bureau, and he believes Black people should have a voice in that justice. He’s principled, upright, respectable; he carries a copy of MLK’s “Why We Can’t Wait” in his car. (Bratton, whose previous film was “The Inspection,” seems to work best with stories about Black men struggling to operate within institutions that don’t suit them.)
So naturally, when he’s paired with Scarpa, who’s dragged back down to Mississippi to help him solve the case as a “special investigator,” the two clash in principle and personality. It’s got all the ingredients of a kind of buddy cop movie, and if Penn’s dialogue and Bratton’s direction leaned further in that avenue, it could have earned it. Instead, Bratton’s austere approach (albeit beautifully filmed, care of Ante Cheng’s moody cinematography, all moody blues and brimstone oranges) keeps the tone downbeat and gnarly, which bumps hard against Wahlberg’s over-the-top, cartoonish performance.
There’s something of the execrable “Green Book” in here too, considering the dynamic—hard-nosed Italian mob type schools an upstanding Black man about the folly of respectability politics—but at least here, Marky Mark isn’t feeding Yahya fried chicken for the first time. Instead, it’s about teaching this man that working within the system doesn’t work, and justice can only be achieved through brute force. When Strider asks Scarpa what he’d do about the specter of white oppression if he were Black, the latter bluntly answers, “I’d kill ’em all.”
Really, it’s Mateen who keeps this whole thing from pulling apart at the seams, struggling through physicality and those deep-well eyes of his to sell a man genuinely driven to the brink by the inhuman horrors he sees, both from Scarpa and the Klan. But the script gives him little to work with, far less interested in his principles as a man of peace and justice than in Scarpa’s more immediately satisfying approach. Mateen sells the discomfort he feels returning to a hometown he certainly left out of safety, his sense of danger suddenly accentuated by his proximity to a similarly out-of-place figure who’s all too happy to draw attention. But this isn’t a buddy film where each member of the pair learns from each other to come to a middle ground that achieves both their goals: Strider is simply naive, and Scarpa, with his baseball bats and pistol-whipping and homophobic taunts, has it really figured out.
Wahlberg’s character, and that performance, feels plopped in from a totally different movie, which is maybe the fish-out-of-water point. But in execution (both figurative and literal), you either want him out of this picture or to fully immerse yourself in the silly exploitation film that he’s operating in. Hearing Terence Blanchard‘s mournful, tense horns over Wahlberg mugging in a bad wig and that nose? It’s a bit hard to swallow. Even as the film teases you with the giddy thrill of getting down in the muck with him.
