Movie Review: BY ANY MEANS

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: September 4th, 2026 / 03:58 AM

BY ANY MEANS movie poster | ©2026 Paramount Pictures

Rating: R
Stars: Yahya Abdul-Mateen III, Mark Wahlberg, Nicole Beharie, Josh Lucas, LisaGay Hamilton, LaChanze, Ethan Embry, Giancarlo Esposito, David Strathairn
Writer: Sascha Penn
Director: Elegance Bratton
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Release Date: September 4, 2026

In 1964, Black civil rights leader Malcolm X gave a speech that included the words, “We want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary.”

“By any means” has largely been interpreted as “including violence.” BY ANY MEANS the movie certainly takes it that way. Directed by Elegance Bratton and scripted by Sascha Penn, it raises a lot of thought-provoking questions but couches them in a way it seems unprepared to fully contemplate.

BY ANY MEANS opens with the onscreen declaration “based on true events.” This much is verifiable: Vernon Dahmer (played by Giancarlo Esposito) and Gregory Scarpa (played by Mark Wahlberg) were both real people.

As shown in BY ANY MEANS, Dahmer was a family man and Black voting-rights advocate in rural Mississippi, where his home and family were attacked and he was murdered on January 10, 1966.

Scarpa, on the other hand, was a member of the Colombo Mafia organization, who reputedly was an FBI informant and sometimes hired by the Feds to get physical with suspects in ways that agents were forbidden from doing.

Reportedly (though the FBI denies it), Scarpa’s methods led to locating the bodies of young civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwermer, murdered by the Klan in Mississippi in 1964.

BY ANY MEANS introduces us to Scarpa as he’s beating a suspect almost to death, on behalf of the FBI, to get the man to reveal where Chaney, Goodman and Schwermer’s corpses are. It’s brutal but gets results.

Two years later, we meet (fictional) Black FBI agent Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen III), who toils thanklessly in the file room of the Bureau’s Mississippi office. He and his wife Allison (Nicole Beharie) have just moved from Chicago back to Strider’s small hometown. Strider is old friends with Dahmer and his family, who live in the neighborhood.

When Dahmer is killed, the FBI runs into a roadblock. The white townsfolk won’t tell tales on their own, and the Black potential witnesses won’t talk to white law enforcement at all.

Strider’s supervisor, Special Agent Roy K. Moore (David Strathairn), therefore decides to put Strider on the case, because the locals know and trust him. Moore also assigns Strider to be Scarpa’s “handler,” as Scarpa’s methods may be called for in getting cooperation from those who conspired to commit the murder.

Scarpa is truly amoral, which is anathema to Strider. Scarpa is also fairly uneducated but surprises Strider by being able to quote “by any means necessary.”

For his part, Scarpa is astounded that Strider’s ethics prevent him from using his badge as an excuse to do absolutely anything.

The conflict here is that Scarpa doesn’t care what he’s doing, to or for whom – he actively enjoys it. Strider cares profoundly about these things. This, plus understandable rage at the perpetrators, starts to make him rethink some of his convictions.

Abdul-Mateen gives Strider an aura of deep feeling and integrity. Wahlberg as Scarpa does something that many actors shy away from, making him not just cynical but actually kind of soulless. Wahlberg’s Scarpa has layers, but we don’t get the feeling that any of them are redemptive.

It’s unclear who thought putting a false nose on Wahlberg was wise for the role. It’s not as though Scarpa is so recognizable that Wahlberg would look wrong without it; it doesn’t say anything about the character and it’s a little distracting.

It would be inaccurate to call BY ANY MEANS a buddy movie – it’s more like a “can barely tolerate each other at best” movie, which is more credible, given who the characters are.

Somewhat less credible is that Moore would task Strider with the investigation, given that he lives in the vicinity. This makes Strider a perilously within-reach target for white supremacists who resent the whole notion of a Black FBI agent, to say nothing of him being on their trail. (Again, since Strider is an invented character, there’s no evidence that anything like this happened in reality.)

Where BY ANY MEANS gets deep but also troubling is in how it handles Strider’s gradual embrace of violence as something that can be not only effective but righteous. Given how he is treated with threats and contempt, we are encouraged to not just witness but actively cheer on Strider’s metamorphosis, especially when it is in response to the criminals’ refusal to respect him as a man and as an officer of the law.

It’s easy to imagine other law enforcement, in other circumstances, feeling entitled to use violence when they feel they are being disrespected. But BY ANY MEANS doesn’t explore this; it never suggests that the sentiments Strider feels can be (and are, on a daily basis) put to bad use. (On a less philosophical note, the movie also makes a joke out of Scarpa killing a bad guy’s dog; it’s not the dog’s fault his owner is a monster.)

As a civil rights piece, BY ANY MEANS doesn’t break new ground, but what it shows is always worth remembering. As a violent actioner, it delivers, and it’s never less than intriguing.

We can momentarily lose ourselves in the comfort of Strider as a fighter for justice. But we come away with a sense of disquiet over the bigger issue of getting us to applaud abuse under color of authority, especially because BY ANY MEANS doesn’t reflect on prompting us to do so.

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