Dallas Film Now.

Inspired by a reportedly true story about Greg Scarpa, a Brooklyn mobster who was used by the FBI to “investigate” racist murders in the Deep South during the 1960s, By Any Means plays more like a loose remake of Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1996), whose original writer included a character based on the same story. 

The key difference here is the protagonist, Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Matteen II), a Black FBI agent from Chicago who transfers to his hometown of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in order to do good in his home state, as his wife Allison (Nicole Beharie) reminds him. Frustrated by the unsolved murders of Black people that have been allowed to pile up in the dusty offices, Wayne leaps at the offer of an ‘off the record’ investigation into the recent death of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer (Giancarlo Esposito), who died when his home was firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan. 

The catch? Wayne has been assigned as a “handler” for some sort of secret agent, and is told that he must follow the orders of the mysterious agent. 

The “agent” is nothing of the sort. He is Greg Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg), a Brooklyn mobster who is introduced in 1964, brutally assaulting a man tied to a chair until the man tells him ‘where the bodies are buried,’ and thus solving a case for the FBI — which is the story told another way in Mississippi Burning. 

Picking up two years later, the local office of the FBI is under pressure from J. Edgar Hoover to solve the murder of Vernon Dahmer, but no local citizens — Black or white — will speak about the case, due to fear of reprisal by the KKK. So, Roy Moore (David Strathairn) decides to call in Greg Scarpa as his brutal bulldog, with a Black man, Wayne, as his front. 

Scarpa gets the call during dinner, where, as a loving family man, he quietly tells his bullied son that he should be sure to beat up the bully as violently as possible. The next day, he’s in Mississippi, shacking up in a motel with a woman who is not his wife, which is where Wayne meets him. 

None too happy about his “handler,” Scarpa nonetheless plods into the case, based on tips from the FBI, who provided him with an untraceable gun and a license to kill, much like James Bond, except without the posh accent and sense of class. Once established as a brutal bully who is a professional killer with no remorse or compunction about hurting others, he remains a feral creature, unleashed and unhinged, requiring little more from Mark Wahlberg, except to grunt and groan and congratulate Wayne as he slowly morphs from a decent and righteous man into an avenging angel bent on “justice” at any cost. 

Yahya Abdul-Matteen II has the much more difficult task of making Wayne’s measured transformation as convincing as possible. His character is not entirely fictional — reports claim that a Black FBI agent was assisting Scarpa in his “investigation” — yet it still represents a tall hurdle to believe that he would completely discard his fervent beliefs in favor of meting out vengeance with quite the fervor that is depicted here. 

From a certain point forward, By Any Means falls into fantasy territory, as in ‘If I was there, THIS is what I would HAVE to do.’ Maybe so, but Scarpa, as played by Wahlberg, is such a noxious, toxic character, that any hint of sympathy or empathy feels entirely misplaced, unbalancing the film to such an extent that it becomes difficult to watch, leaving a sour taste in the stomach. 

The film is now playing throughout Dallas and Fort Worth. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes, if you must.