‘By Any Means’ Review: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Mark Wahlberg Make an Uneasy, Occasionally Gripping Odd Couple

Elegance Bratton’s crime thriller finds real tension in an unlikely partnership, but it’s less sure of what to actually say about the violence it puts on screen.

There’s a version of By Any Means that trusts its audience enough to sit with genuine moral discomfort. This isn’t quite that film, but it comes close often enough to make its shortcomings frustrating rather than fatal.

The setup draws from a genuinely strange chapter of American history. In January 1966, Klansmen firebombed the home of Vernon Dahmer, a farmer, shopkeeper, and president of the Forrest County NAACP chapter in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, who had publicly offered to pay the poll tax out of his own pocket for any Black citizen who couldn’t afford it. Dahmer returned fire long enough for his wife and children to escape. He died from his injuries.

In the investigation that followed, the FBI reportedly turned to Gregory Scarpa, a Colombo crime family captain working as a federal informant, to extract information the bureau couldn’t legally obtain itself.

Elegance Bratton’s film imagines that arrangement running through a fictional handler, Wayne Strider, an idealistic Black FBI agent played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, paired against his will with Mark Wahlberg’s Scarpa. The film opens on Scarpa in a warehouse, beating a bound man with a baseball bat, a scene that would play as generic crime-thriller filler if the preceding montage hadn’t already established what he’s actually beating out of him: the location of three murdered civil rights workers’ bodies.

What it does have, reliably, is two well-matched leads. Strider is cautious, by-the-book, a born-and-raised local who knows exactly how little his federal badge protects him in this part of the country. He carries a copy of King’s Why We Can’t Wait in his car.

Scarpa is loud, casually brutal, and genuinely believes his own myth of untouchability, to the point of telling Strider that if he were a Black man in Mississippi, he’d simply kill every racist who crossed him. The film gets good mileage out of how differently these two men have learned to survive.

That juxtaposition is the whole movie in miniature, and it’s genuinely effective the first time. Familiar genre mechanics, loaded with historical weight they weren’t built to carry. The tension between those two things produces some real charge early on, and it’s what keeps By Any Means watchable even as it becomes clear the film doesn’t quite know what to do with the collision it’s engineered.

Abdul-Mateen II is doing the heavier lifting, and he’s excellent at it. He sells Strider’s decency without making it saintly, and he’s especially good in the domestic scenes with Nicole Beharie, playing a wife who’s given almost nothing on the page and finds something anyway.

There’s a watchfulness to the performance, a sense of a man constantly calculating what a given room will cost him, that’s more interesting than anything the script asks him to say out loud.

Wahlberg is the odder fit, and not only because a Boston accent keeps threatening to surface underneath the Brooklyn one. He’s never quite convincing as a made man in the Scorsese tradition. But the miscasting works in a strange way, giving Scarpa a feral, unplaceable quality that keeps him from settling into stock-gangster rhythm.

When he’s genuinely menacing, it’s because he seems unpredictable rather than practiced, which turns out to be the right note for a character whose entire function is doing what trained professionals won’t.

Bratton, whose The Inspection announced him as a filmmaker with real interest in institutional cruelty and the people who survive it, stages the action with a crispness that makes the film’s pulpier stretches genuinely enjoyable.

Terence Blanchard’s smoky jazz score does enormous quiet work, lending sequences a gravity the screenplay doesn’t always supply on its own. There’s a Klansman who threatens to hang Strider off a bridge early on, and a much later scene where that same man finds himself begging not to be hanged off one, and the film knows precisely how satisfying that reversal plays. It is satisfying. That’s not nothing.

The problem is what the film does with that satisfaction, which is mostly nothing at all.

Strider’s arc should be the story of a principled man discovering what he’s willing to become. He crosses legal lines, then moral ones, in pursuit of something he believes is worth it. That’s a genuinely rich premise, and Sascha Penn’s script keeps setting it up without ever following through. Every time Strider hesitates, the plot punishes him for it.

Every time he adopts Scarpa’s methods, he gets results, and respect, and the narrative’s approval. The film consistently frames his initial caution as naivety to be cured rather than a value worth defending.

What that produces is a strange, slightly queasy fantasy: violence that leaves no mark on the person committing it. Strider ends the film essentially unchanged, morally speaking, having done things that should have changed him enormously.

By treating brutality as the only functional response to an unjust world, the movie quietly absolves him of choosing it, and absolves us of enjoying watching him choose it. It’s a much less interesting film than the one about a man who has to live with what he did.

There’s a related gap in how the movie handles the FBI itself. By Any Means gestures at the bureau’s indifference to Black victims, its reluctance to act until a president applies pressure.

What it never acknowledges is that during this exact period, the FBI was actively surveilling and working to destroy figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

A film this invested in the moral compromise of working inside a corrupt institution has an obvious open door there, and walks right past it. The result is an institution portrayed as merely unhelpful rather than actively hostile, which softens the whole enterprise considerably.

That softening extends to the history itself, and it’s worth sitting with rather than waving away. Dahmer’s family has publicly raised concerns about how the film handles his story.

Giancarlo Esposito plays him in a brief but genuinely striking appearance, and Dahmer registers as a real presence in the few minutes he’s given. But the film’s actual interest is in the men investigating his death, not the man who died, and the body count Strider and Scarpa rack up across the back half plays as pure genre catharsis rather than anything resembling the documented record. A real person died protecting his neighbors’ right to vote.

Building a buddy-thriller around the aftermath is a genuinely difficult needle to thread, and By Any Means doesn’t thread it so much as decide, partway through, that it would rather be a different kind of movie.

None of which makes it a bad time at the theater. The performances are strong, the craft is real, and the film moves.

Abdul-Mateen II in particular is doing work that deserves a sharper screenplay around it, and the Blanchard score alone justifies hearing this one in a good room.

But there’s a more honest, more unsettling film sitting just underneath this one, visible in flashes, that would have asked harder questions about what justice costs when the system responsible for delivering it has already decided you don’t count. 

By Any Means keeps finding that movie and then flinching away from it.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

That’s A Wrap | By Any Means

CREDITS
Release Date: September 4, 2026
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Director: Elegance Bratton
Screenwriter: Sascha Penn
Cast: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Mark Wahlberg, Nicole Beharie, Giancarlo Esposito, Josh Lucas, LisaGay Hamilton, LaChanze, Ethan Embry, David Strathairn
Music: Terence Blanchard
Runtime: 1 hour 47 minutes
Rating: R

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Joanthan P. Moustakas

Jonathan P. Moustakas founded The Cinema Group in 2020 during the challenges of the pandemic, after losing the vital ability to find community in theaters and escape through the captivating magic of cinema. Feeling profoundly cut off from the vibrant film community he cherished, he sought to create a welcoming home for dedicated cinema fans while providing engaging, daily curated content that resonates with their passions. Years later, The Cinema Group has blossomed from a small collective of loyal fans into a thriving brand that reaches millions of audiences every month across a diverse array of platforms and mediums.

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