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There’s a particularly nasty question lurking beneath every frame of Elegance Bratton’s By Any Means: What happens when the people responsible for enforcing the law decide the only way to achieve justice is to break the damn thing?

It’s a moral contradiction the film doesn’t attempt to neatly solve, and I think that’s precisely why it works as well as it does. Bratton (“American Horror Story”) and screenwriter Sascha Penn (1992) aren’t handing us a history lesson with the answers printed upside down at the bottom of the page. They’re asking us to sit and stew with the contradictions… and there are plenty.

Set in 1960s Mississippi, specifically Hattiesburg, By Any Means follows Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Candyman), a young Black FBI agent investigating a series of violent KKK attacks, including the murder of NAACP activist Vernon Dahmer (Giancarlo Esposito, “Breaking Bad”). His unlikely partner is Greg Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg), a mobster and FBI informant whose particular investigative technique might politely be described as “enhanced persuasion.” Scarpa doesn’t exactly knock, introduce himself, and ask if this is a convenient time for questioning.

If some of this terrain feels familiar, it should. Mississippi Burning immediately comes to mind, and By Any Means occasionally feels like that film’s rougher, morally queasier cousin. But Bratton approaches the material from another direction. Rather than simply asking how far law enforcement should go to fight evil, her movie wonders what happens when the government hires evil—or at least someone intimately acquainted with it—to do the fighting.

That makes Strider and Scarpa a fascinating pairing. There are echoes of Driving Miss Daisy and Green Book in the film’s use of two men separated by race, experience, temperament, and worldview being forced into close proximity in the segregated South. But nobody should mistake this for a comfortable road movie about two guys discovering they’re not so different after all. This road has potholes, burning crosses, crooked cops, and enough moral landmines to blow the car to smithereens.

Abdul-Mateen is terrific because his Strider must constantly calculate the danger around him. He’s an FBI agent carrying federal authority, yet that badge provides considerably less protection once the wrong people see the color of the man wearing it. Wahlberg, meanwhile, gives Scarpa the volatile energy of a lit cigarette tossed into a gasoline can. We know something will eventually ignite; we’re simply waiting to see who gets burned.

Nicole Beharie, David Strathairn, and Esposito add considerable dramatic weight, with Esposito making his Dahmer feel like more than merely the historical tragedy that sets the machinery into motion.

If there’s anything about the film to knock, it’s that the movie’s most intriguing contradiction involves Strider himself. We’re asked to reconcile his admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. with his employment by an FBI that was simultaneously conducting an appalling campaign of surveillance and harassment against King back in the day. Rather than sinking the movie, though, I think that contradiction strengthens it. By Any Means keeps throwing the ugliness of history back at us: nothing about this period fits comfortably into the tidy boxes we might prefer. And that sentiment is hard. Hard, but important.

And that brings us to the title. If justice can only be obtained “by any means,” at what point do the means poison the justice?

Bratton doesn’t pretend to know the answer. He just throws the question back at us.

What I appreciate most about By Any Means is that it understands law and justice are not necessarily synonymous. Sometimes they’re neighbors. Sometimes they’re complete strangers. And sometimes, frighteningly, they’re standing on opposite sides of the same Mississippi road staring each other down.

Who is going to flinch first?

MPAA Rating: R.
Runtime: 107 mins
Director: Elegance Bratton
Writer: Sascha Penn
Cast: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II; Mark Wahlberg; Nicole Beharie
Genre: Action | Crime
Tagline: The FBI Couldn't Crack it. So They Called in the Mob.
Memorable Movie Quote: "I work for the FBI. Trouble is what I do."
Distributor: Paramount
Official Site:
Release Date: September 4, 2026
DVD/Blu-ray Release Date:
Synopsis: A notorious mafia hitman and a young Black FBI agent team up to investigate the murders of civil rights leaders in 1966 Mississippi.