“By Any Means” is a movie about two disparate FBI employees that can’t decide if it wants to be a “Buddy Cop” movie or not. The pair are mismatched, but are they “comically” mismatched? The result is an uneven tone that makes the movie too dark for matinee action fans and too ridiculous for true-crime aficionados.
The movie takes place primarily in Mississippi in 1966. Local agent Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul Mateen II) is eager to prove that he, as a Black man, can handle more than a desk job. He’s assigned to investigate the murder of civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer (Giancarlo Esposito) by assisting informant-turned-asset Gregory Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg), a New York mobster known for uncondoned methods of getting answers. For different reasons, neither Strider nor Scarpa is particularly welcome in Klan-infested 1960’s Mississippi.
Strider and Scarpa settle into a give-and-take rapport, but when it comes to the investigation, it’s almost always about Scarpa using violence to get what he wants. And there is a lot of violence. Granted, Scarpa’s interrogations are always against perpetrators of horrific violence themselves, which just means that all “action” sequences in this movie are a rough watch.
I get the point of making the violence in “By Any Means” so ugly, as there are no winners in a hate-based war. But did this movie have to take so many cues from lighter Buddy Cop movies, as if it couldn’t sell itself as something heavier? The film takes itself both too seriously and not seriously enough, working occasionally, but not consistently. It never quite finds the means to elicit laughs “or” screams.
Grade: C
“By Any Means” is rated R for violence/bloody images and pervasive language. Its running time is 107 minutes.
Contact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.
