Treading familiar story beats or tropes time and time again in film is often viewed as a crutch or something to be criticized, but any film aficionado knows that clichés and nods to films of old can be quite effective when well implemented. Common tropes and plot beats are part of nearly every story ever told, and they can be incredibly effective when a movie doesn’t lean on them too heavily, especially in films so deeply intertwined with their genre roots.
The problem with a film like By Any Means isn’t just that everything it offers its viewers has been executed infinitely better elsewhere; it fails to fully commit to literally any of the films it’s trying to be. By Any Means is part drama surrounding racial rights within the civil rights era, part buddy cop procedural, and part crime thriller, but all the elements are just thrown together, leading to a film with no clear identity, becoming one big pile of meh. The performances from most cast members range from serviceable to fairly strong, and the filmmaking isn’t incompetent, but By Any Means is so by-the-numbers it might not even be worth a watch on its own as a TNT cable classic you can watch on TV.
The film takes place in the 1960s (and starts with a ” based on a true story” text), following Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a Black FBI agent returning to his hometown in Mississippi from Chicago. He’s there with his wife (Nicole Beharie) despite the South being much less safe for Black Americans because he wants to contribute to the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and the voting rights they’re fighting for through cases, but struggles to play by the rules in a system that’s so vehemently antagonistic against his race.
After a case opens involving J. Edgar Hoover coercing the FBI into finding the Ku Klux Klan members responsible for the fire bombing and murder of NAACP president Vernon Dahmer (Giancarlo Esposito), Strider is finally given a case to work on. The catch is, he’ll be forced to team up with quite the unorthodox partner. Strider’s partner is the notorious mobster Gregory Scalpa (Mark Wahlberg), the type of guy who likes to crack a skull or two before using his words, and let’s just say the two of them have hefty moral dilemmas about the best way to bring about justice as they find witnesses to narrow down the murderers.
The most interesting aspects of the moral quandaries surrounding the implementation of violence in this narrative are really only vaguely alluded to within Sascha Penn’s screenplay. The different viewpoints of Wayne and Gregory surrounding the right way to seek what’s right and just are inherently compelling, even as a conflict that’s not exactly fresh out of the oven. There exists an ironic nature in the fact that a white man needs to teach a Black man about the meaning of Malcom X’s “by any means necessary” phrase, but the film is so unbalanced regarding the central conceit of its conflict that it can never once register as compelling even if there, of course, exist plenty of pleasure in seeing racist scum of the earth getting their shins kicked in.
Director Elegance Bratton helms both the melodramatic and thrilling aspects of the film competently enough, but the deeper issues of the film lacking any clear path it wants to take still persist as the main problem. When considering Green Book, Spike Lee works like BlacKkKlansman, and even films with similar loglines like Mississippi Burning, it is clear By Any Means’ playbook pulls from a lot of the best hallmarks of what it’s clearly inspired by. The issue is, it can’t pick any lane to provide a hook on what new it can bring to the table regarding racial inequality or buddy cop dynamics to make it anything other than a mediocre rendition of dynamics and thematic ideas executed so much better in many other places. A rock-solid performance from Mateen and a one-note, but admittedly more interesting, performance from Walberg as of late isn’t enough to distract from such shortcomings.
There will certainly be an audience for By Any Means, and the film is okay enough that many will find it watchable, but it can’t fully commit to its buddy cop crime/thriller dynamics or deeper dramatic turmoil revolving around the bleak sides of state-sanctioned violence to be anything other than aggressively average.
By Any Means is currently playing in theaters courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
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There will certainly be an audience for By Any Means, and the film is okay enough that many will find it watchable, but it can’t fully commit to its buddy cop crime/thriller dynamics or deeper dramatic turmoil revolving around the bleak sides of state-sanctioned violence to be anything other than aggressively average.
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GVN Rating
Lover of film writing about film. Member of the Dallas Fort-Worth Critics Association. The more time passes, the more the medium of movies has become deeply intertwined with who I am.
