By Any Means

 

Elegance Bratton's cinematic telling of an actual FBI pairing of a mob enforcer who is also a government asset (Mark Wahlberg) and a Black special agent (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) in Mississippi in the '60s is a brutally visceral presentation of a wide gray line walked by law enforcement in pursuit of justice in a hostile and unjust region.

The film opens with Wahlberg's Greg Scarpa putting a baseball bat to the body of a known Klansman to extract information on the location of the bodies of missing Civil Rights workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. Scarpa is clearly a sadist who derives great joy from the bashing. That he is able to pull the needed information is almost an incidental by-product.

When Abdul-Mateen's Wayne Strider is pulled into the case of the firebombing and murder of a local NAACP organizer (Giancarlo Esposito), he has been sitting idle in the field office for a while, stifled by administrative indifference and the Klan's terrorism.

As one would expect, Strider doesn't trust Scarpa or his methods at first, but eventually comes around to seeing that the hit man's ways, while criminal in themselves, are effective.

An early conversation between the two revolves around the film's title statement, attributed to Malcolm X, whom Scarpa sees as a more serious threat to embedded racism than Martin Luther King Jr.'s peaceful resistance. When Strider's own home is fired upon by Klansman, he is given more reason to adopt more forceful methods.

"By Any Means" is not a film about a questionable ethical code. It's more a rationalization for fighting fire with fire, one which many members of the audience will embrace ... possibly seeing contemporary applications, as well.