By Any Means Review: Elegance Bratton's Tense Thriller

The premise is almost too impossible to believe, which is why it burns so bright on screen. It’s 1964. Wayne Strider (Abdul-Mateen II), a brilliant and upwardly mobile young Black FBI agent from the North, is handed an assignment no one else wants: infiltrate Mississippi’s Klan-adjacent networks after a wave of targeted murders of civil rights organizers. The Bureau, hamstrung by J. Edgar Hoover’s ambivalence and local corruption, has decided the cleanest instrument is dirty. Enter Gregory Scarpa (Wahlberg) - a Jewish-Italian mob captain from Brooklyn, known for his casual cruelty and a photographic memory for “favors.” Strider is ordered to serve as Scarpa’s handler and partner, using the gangster’s terrifying methods to extract information that legal channels can’t touch.

The two men are oil and vinegar, but as bodies pile up and the Klan’s reach extends into local law enforcement, Strider discovers that Scarpa’s brutal pragmatism isn’t just effective - it’s seductive. The investigation forces Strider to confront a question that gnaws at him: if the system you serve is rotten, is it betrayal to let a monster do your dirty work? Based loosely on the unsealed FBI files around Scarpa’s Mississippi operations, the screenplay (credited to three writers) doesn’t fictionalize the dark core. It dramatizes the psychological toll with unnerving precision, while a subplot involving Giancarlo Esposito’s dignified, doomed Vernon Dahmer provides the moral compass neither protagonist can hold steady.

Bratton shoots Mississippi not as a foggy memory of lynching-era cinema but as a bright, brutal, sun-scorched landscape. The light is painful, the dust clings to the lens. He’s less interested in recreating the era’s iconic marches than in the off-camera rooms where terrible decisions were made. The film’s greatest strength is its refusal to sanctify Strider. Abdul-Mateen II plays him as a man whose ambition is indistinguishable from his idealism - he wants to do good, but he also wants to be somebody in the Bureau. That fissure is exactly what Scarpa exploits. The actor’s face, often still while inner gears turn, sells the brutal education of a man learning that the law is not a shield.

Wahlberg, meanwhile, has never been better deployed. Scarpa is not a cartoon psychopath; he’s a creature of awful charisma, capable of buying a Black family a house in the morning and breaking a man’s jaw in the afternoon. Wahlberg leans into the cadence of a New York hustler, but he gives Scarpa a sorrowful, weary undertow. There’s a scene where he explains to Strider why the mob is more honest than the FBI - “We don’t pretend to wear white hats, kid” - and it lands with the weight of a confession. Nicole Beharie, as a local schoolteacher who becomes Strider’s fragile moral anchor, and David Strathairn, as a weaselly Bureau superior, both add texture, but the film is a two-hander at its soul.

The pacing is relentless to a fault - some twists arrive breathlessly - but Brattan’s control of tone is masterful. He shifts from procedural to nerve-racking suspense to sudden, sickening violence without losing the emotional thread. The climax, a siege at a rural safe house, is one of the most tensely staged action sequences in recent memory, precisely because it isn’t about bullets - it’s about whose soul survives the exchange.

Pros:

• Abdul-Mateen II and Wahlberg deliver career-best, layered performances.
• Brattan’s direction refuses easy moral binaries, forcing the audience to sit in the gray.
• Sharp, period-authentic dialogue that never sounds like a history lesson.
• Cinematography that makes Mississippi both beautiful and menacing.
• Esposito’s brief but devastating turn as Dahmer provides historical gravitas.

Cons:

• The subplot with Beharie’s character feels underexplored, almost truncated.
• The final act’s rapid-fire resolution undersells the ethical reckoning built up for two hours.
• Some secondary white antagonists veer into mustache-twirling caricature.
• Wahlberg’s accent occasionally slips into a generic tough-guy cadence.

By Any Means is not a film about a good man and a bad man teaming up. It’s about the fiction that such categories remain separate when you are standing in a burning house. Bratton has made a movie that is uncomfortable, upsetting, and uncommonly honest about the compromises that built - and broke - American justice. It earns its 8.6 average rating on TMDb not by being likable but by being undeniable. See it on a big screen, where its shadows and silences have maximum room to haunt you.