The Current Cinema - Overwhelming mayhem unleashed in BY ANY MEANS (Elegance Bratton, USA, 2026)

Spoiler alert. The whole plot is given away

OK. First start with the last. At the end of By Any Means there are forty five people credited as producers, executive producers, co-executive producers and co-producers. There is also a person credited as “Associate Producer”. With all that creative input how could anything go wrong.

 

I don’t suppose it does in a way. There are parallel openings to the movie. First we see Marc Wahlberg taking a baseball bat to a man who is tied up, battered and bruised. Wahlberg, playing gangster Greg Scarpa, wants names of the battered man’s criminal associates. He gives them up and Wahlberg continues to lay into him with the baseball bat. OK…we’ve got the message he’s a cold-blooded sadist as well as everything else we’ll discover about him. It took a moment to recognise Wahlberg because here he sports a rather prominent false nose. If you follow it, it's been on the online low-rent media for over a year.…

 

Cut to  an African American in a suit walking down a corridor.  We learn he’s an FBI Agent and quickly discover he’s a token black guy. He’s sidelined and ignored.  We learn that in the days when and where the movie is set, 1960s Mississippi, since the FBI was created a half a century or more ago, there have been barely a couple of handfuls of black FBI Agents. Agent Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II)  has asked for a transfer to an office in the south where he is treated mostly with disdain and not allocated any meaningful detective work. He wants to take on the Ku Klux Klan but it’s not until the regional FBI manager, in some desperation, decides that he’s going to play fast and loose that things start to happen.  Scarpa has a sideline as a fixer for the FBI when all else fails. He and Strider are given the job to find the KKK killers of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer. Then the mayhem really starts. 

 

Scarpa is a psychopath. After the initial bashing, in case you weren’t convinced he might have an evil streak, he shoots a traffic cop for basically no reason at all.  Then a series of extremely violent scenes take place until some kind of honour is finally served. Scarpa goes back to his criminal life in New Jersey and Strider accepts you have to make compromises to bring some people to some kind of justice. That’s it…. another film that’s inspired by true American events…