When chasing justice, behaving just doesn’t always get the job done. While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent Voting Rights Act of 1965 were solidified into law, adoption of these were met with resistance in many areas, especially the South. In 1966 Hattiesburg, Mississippi, prominent activist Vernon Dahmer (Giancarlo Esposito) has offered to pay the voting poll tax for any African American unable to do so. His actions incite violence from the local Ku Klux Klan, who moonlight by day as law enforcement. Less than 24 hours after hosting a voters rally at his residence, Vernon’s home is bombed by the KKK, and while he manages to get his family to safety, he dies from smoke inhalation.

FBI agent Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) has relocated from Chicago to his hometown Hattiesburg with wife Allison (Nicole Beharie), motivated to solve cases that have curiously gone unsolved. He’s asked by his superiors to find the perpetrators responsible for Vernon’s death. Even with a badge, his efforts to solve the case and get people to talk on the record will be futile due to the color of his skin, which is why the agency pairs him with Greg Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg). Unbeknownst to Strider, Scarpa is a Brooklyn-based mob enforcer who has already worked with the FBI two years prior in helping to locate the bodies of activists who had gone missing. The partnership between the law abiding Strider and the rule breaking Scarpa immediately brings friction, but working together is probably the best opportunity to secure any sort of justice.

With its setting and antagonists featured, it’s easy to watch By Any Means and think of works such as Mississippi Burning, Ghosts of Mississippi, and BlacKkKlansman. One movie it immediately reminded me of is Black Mass, very similar in using a nefarious character (played by an actor using prominent makeup and prosthetics) operating within the system, but given the latitude to paint the picture how he sees fit in order to obtain results. There are definitely some things that make By Any Means easy to embrace, and others where the movie feels like it’s at war with itself in what it wants to say or achieve.

It’s hard to nitpick anything director Elegance Bratton is doing behind the camera. In his second feature film, he’s the driver of a handful of rather impressive moments. Collaborating with cinematographer Ante Cheng, By Any Means is lit very well, and the grounded car chase as well as the visceral interrogation scenes benefit from it being so. Provided by composer Terence Blanchard, a vibe of noir can be felt. Even a really brief first person-style shooting sequence that I’m not sure was necessary exists too, but it does show Bratton getting creative as it’s edited into the scene seamlessly. I would love to see his skills in a mid budget action or some type of heavier atmospheric thriller.

Written by Sascha Penn, it’s not advised to go into By Any Means hoping for a deep portrait of its characters; Agent Strider himself is a fictional composite of other unnamed Black federal law enforcement professionals. The film most resembles a revenge thriller, but tries to fold in awkward buddy cop humor leanings, as well as history education/rumination, and a traditional police procedural. If the title weren’t a dead giveaway, the opposing philosophies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. are discussed by the two main characters, and it’s pretty clear the approach the film backs most. All together, the parts are a bit too disparate to feel fully satisfied when the runtime concludes, accentuated by a “climax” that feels like it should be the setup to the biggest moment of the film, instead of being the biggest moment, which is then followed by an expedited press conference serving as the epilogue to wrap up everything.

In very limited screen time, the always reliable Esposito is unsurprisingly so here. But, the movie is built around Mateen and Wahlberg. Separately, they’re doing entertaining work, with Wahlberg definitely going for it and infusing a ton of…color, into the role, whereas Mateen does well in trying to maintain a stoic, professional demeanor while the murky realities of what it’ll take to secure justice become crystallized. Though it’s likely the two’s chemistry isn’t supposed to be there, it’s hard to not feel that Wahlberg’s performance would be a stronger fit in something that is an actual dark comedy.

My overall verdict on By Any Means lands somewhere in the same neighborhood as this year’s One Spoon of Chocolate. By any measure, there’s much more filmmaking polish and stronger lead work than RZA’s movie. By the end, messy justice gets served, dipped in a smorgasbord of genres and tones.

C+

Photo credits go to impawards.com, screenrant.com, IMDB.com, and rottentomatoes.com.