Elegance Bratton’s new crime drama “By Any Means” has one hell of a pitch. It’s about a by-the-book Black FBI agent who teams up with an Italian-American mafia hitman to fight the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in 1966. That sounds like the best cop show ever, and maybe some day it will be, with Special Agent Wayne Strider and bullish lout Gregory Scarpa taking down racist scumbags every Tuesday at 9pm Pacific. If the Best Picture winner “In the Heat of the Night” could become an Emmy-winning series that ran for seven seasons, why not “By Any Means?”
Of course, “By Any Means” isn’t a pilot episode, even though it plays like one. It’s an uneven but durable film starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Special Agent Strider. He moves back to his hometown in Mississippi with big ideas about bringing justice to a region where racism runs rampant and the Klan kills indiscriminately. After civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer (Giancarlo Esposito) is murdered, the FBI discovers nobody will testify against the Klan. All the witnesses are either scared for their lives or, if they’re white, too bigoted to care that Dahmer is dead. A lot of them are even happy about it.
With J. Edgar Hoover breathing down their necks and Lyndon B. Johnson breathing down Hoover’s neck, Strider’s bosses take the nuclear option. They ask hitman-slash-FBI informant Gregory Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg) to come to Mississippi and torture or kill all the racist sacks of crap getting in their way. Strider and Scarpa are forced to team up, but they couldn’t be more different, and it’s fun to watch them beat the hell out of each other when they finally decide they can’t take it anymore.
It’s slightly less convincing when they find common ground. In Elegance Bratton’s eyes, Scarpa is just another white guy who can get away with murder. It just so happens that he’s less racist than the others and using his privilege, for the moment, for the right reasons. “By Any Means” works best when Scarpa tries to needle Strider into using his FBI authority to lay into the bigoted monsters ruining his life. Strider is obviously tempted but he knows Scarpa lives in a different universe. The hitman will go home to Brooklyn in a few days like nothing ever happened. Strider has to keep living next door to these monsters, and they’re just as likely to take their revenge on his innocent wife, played by Nicole Beharie, as they are on him.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II develops this character with incredible insight and subtlety, even when he snaps and takes Scarpa’s bait. Mark Wahlberg gets to play a larger-than-life caricature and get away with it, so the fact that he’s uncomplicated and annoying actually feeds into Abdul-Mateen II’s performance, on and off the screen. His co-star may be skimming the surface, but Abdul-Mateen II goes to labyrinthine lengths, damn near every minute, to get to the real soul of this material. It’s another standout performance from an actor who specializes in standout performances.
In contrast, Wahlberg is Wahlberg-ing. Scarpa is a more intriguing character than the two-time Oscar nominee usually plays these days; at some point he settled into an archetype and more or less stopped fighting it. Wahlberg’s not playing Gregory Scarpa so much as he’s playing Angry Wahlberg, a not-so-distant cousin of his bitter cop routine in “The Departed.” Scarpa can phone his life in, so Wahlberg’s straightforward acting, again, feels oddly appropriate. Just not particularly praiseworthy.
Sascha Penn’s screenplay is smart and well-structured, but the cracks start to show towards the end. We meet key players in the Ku Klux Klan — including their leader, played by an uncomfortably effective Ethan Embry — but some of them sit out the final act, leaving the climax a little unfulfilling. Not that the Klan was going to be taken down over the course of this one story, in Mississippi in 1966 no less, but “By Any Means” tries to bring this narrative to a satisfying conclusion and stops slightly short. Just another reason why this mostly fine film would play better as the start of these characters’ stories, as opposed to a complete saga in itself.
Then again, “By Any Means” is based on a true story, loosely, and if history was as gratifying as our fantasies then the fiction section in your local book store would be a lot smaller. Still, Bratton does a skilled, professional job of making “By Any Means” work as a historical drama and a high-concept buddy cop thriller, filming certain scenes with old-fashioned austerity and others with a muscular fury usually reserved for less ambitious thrill rides. This movie was directed with, let’s just say it, elegance, spiked whenever necessary with a piercing jab to the ribs.
It’s too much of a cop thriller to be a great serious drama, and too much of a serious drama to be a great cop thriller. But it comes close enough, to both, to be worthwhile.
