By Any Means (2026)

A Black FBI agent shakes hands with a mafia hitman in a Mississippi motel room, and neither man trusts the other enough to sit with his back to the door. That’s the image By Any Means keeps returning to, and it’s the smartest choice Elegance Bratton makes in a film that otherwise wobbles between conviction and caution.

Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is sent south in 1966 to investigate a string of killings targeting civil rights leaders, only to find the Bureau he serves is at best indifferent and at worst complicit. His unlikely partner is Greg Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg), a New York hitman whose menace the film never quite lets us forget even as it asks us to cheer for him. Two men who despise everything the other represents, forced into the same car, the same motel rooms, the same impossible investigation. It’s a premise with real bite.

Abdul-Mateen carries the movie. He plays Strider’s fury as something banked rather than blazing, a man doing calculus in every scene about what he can say, to whom, and at what cost. His face in the interrogation scenes carries a whole moral argument the script never states outright, and that restraint is exactly right. Wahlberg, to his credit, resists the temptation to make Scarpa charming. He’s frightening in the ordinary way, a man for whom violence is simply a tool, no drama attached. David Strathairn and Josh Lucas fill out a Bureau that ranges from openly hostile to merely self-protecting, and the film is smart enough not to give either of them a redemption arc they haven’t earned. Giancarlo Esposito plays Vernon Dahmer, the civil rights leader whose murder sets the investigation in motion, and he grounds every scene he’s in with a stillness the film needs.

Bratton, working from Sascha Penn’s screenplay, shoots Mississippi as a place that has learned to look ordinary while doing something monstrous, and Ante Cheng’s cinematography backs that choice with wide, flat daylight instead of the shadowy period-thriller default. The violence, when it comes, feels exposed rather than atmospheric, never romanticised. Terence Blanchard’s score stays mostly out of the way. Until it doesn’t. When it swells, it earns the swell.

My objection to the film sits with what it argues, not how it’s made. The title makes a claim: that justice, denied through proper channels, has to be pursued by any means available, and the film wants us to feel the moral weight of that trade. It does the setup well. It’s less convincing on the follow-through. The back half leans harder into thriller mechanics, chases and confrontations, than into the harder question of what it costs Strider to become the kind of man who works with Scarpa at all. A late scene gestures at that cost without really sitting in it. Judas and the Black Messiah, by comparison, never let the human wreckage of compromised justice slip from view for a single frame; By Any Means occasionally forgets, reaching instead for momentum.

That’s a real flaw, and I don’t want to talk myself out of naming it. But it doesn’t sink the film. The central pairing stays compelling to the end, the history behind it has genuine weight, and Bratton knows how to build tension out of a hotel room and two wary men. It’s a good film that wants to be a great one and pulls up just short of the harder truth it set out to tell.

Worth the time, particularly for viewers who go in knowing it’s a thriller with a conscience rather than a film built entirely around one.