‘By Any Means’: A True-Crime Thriller Getting By On Lukewarm Justice

For a film about breaking the rules when the system fails, By Any Means is frustratingly conventional.

Set against the lingering violence of the post-segregation South, the film follows Wayne Strider, an FBI agent (Yahya Abdul Mateen II) investigating the killing of a civil rights activist, and Greg Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg), a mafia hitman recruited to help him. The premise is outrageous enough to work: an arm of the law quietly outsourcing its business to organised crime because the supposedly righteous route isn’t getting results. It opens the door to fascinating questions about who gets to decide what justice looks like when the institutions charged with delivering it are themselves compromised.

The performances make the unlikely partnership, and film, work. Abdul-Mateen and Wahlberg play off each other effectively, their antagonism giving the film some welcome bite as their opposing approaches to justice repeatedly collide. Abdul-Mateen is particularly affecting when his character is rejected, humiliated and beaten down by the racism surrounding him. Those scenes are difficult to watch because the performance makes the injustice feel personal rather than historical abstraction. The film succeeds at making prejudice visceral, even when it struggles to reckon with what that prejudice means on a larger scale.

That is where By Any Means starts to lose its grip. Once the novelty of the pairing wears off, the dynamic settles into the oldest buddy-cop trick in the book: one man follows the rules, the other gleefully ignores them, and somewhere between the two they discover a begrudging respect. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that formula, but this story has considerably more to offer. The film gestures towards institutional racism, moral compromise and justice outside the system, yet rarely sits with any of those contradictions for long. Its answer increasingly feels less like a reckoning with a broken system than a cathartic shrug: if the law won’t deal with the racists, someone else will.

Stylistically, though, By Any Means is assured. A smoky, jazz-inflected score gives the film a noirish pulse, while its grounded performances and grimy atmosphere suit a story about compromised men operating in the shadows. Even when the screenplay feels familiar, the filmmaking rarely does. There is, however, an unmistakable whiff of prestige calculation in the mix, from the true-story framing and weighty social issues to Wahlberg’s conspicuous prosthetic, as though the film occasionally wants to announce its importance rather than trust the material to speak for itself.

Ultimately, By Any Means gets the job done. It’s solidly performed, stylishly made and occasionally affecting, but its extraordinary premise deserved a much less ordinary film. For a story about going outside the rules to deliver justice, it plays things remarkably safe.

3/5

By Any Means is in cinemas now.