MOVIES: By Any Means (2026, Elegance Bratton)

The movie begins with a "based on a true story" text card, and ends with text telling us that the FBI has never confirmed any of the story the movie tells. It would seem that Bratton has left it up to us how much faith we should put in his ostensibly true story.

It is, if nothing else, a colorful tale, and a few parts of it are confirmable history. In 1966, the home of Mississippi civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer is firebombed by the KKK; Dahmer dies in the fire. The FBI sends one of its agents, a Black man originally from the area, to investigate.

And here we have our first "really?" moment. It is unsurprising that no one in the area is willing to talk to anyone from the FBI, for fear of Klan retribution; surely even the blinkered white guys at the FBI would have understood that a Black agent was even less likely to get cooperation. It also seems unlikely to me that they would place in charge of the investigation an agent who was a close friend of the deceased.

But in this telling of the tale, at any rate, they send a Black agent, who gets no cooperation. And that leads his superiors at the Jackson field office to send him a partner, a Brooklyn Mafia hitman who is sent in with instructions to get information -- ideally, to get a confession -- by any means necessary, including violence, torture, and murder. The hitman has done this before, he tells the agent, working on the investigation into the Chaney/Goodman/Schwerner murders. The FBI agent is initially shocked, but eventually swayed by the results the thug is getting.

Bratton has certainly assembled (with one exception, which we'll get to) a fine cast to tell his story. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is Agent Wayne Strider; Nicole Beharie is his wife, Allison. Dahmer and his wife, Hattie, are played by Giancarlo Esposito and LaChanze. The bosses at the FBI field office are Josh Lucas and David Strathairn, and LisaGay Hamilton shows up for one impeccable scene as Dahmer's neighbor, who witnessed the firebombing and is reluctant to say anything.

There are moments when those actors deliver fine work, and Bratton's movie comes to vibrant life. The Dahmers and the Striders chat after a voting rights rally; that lone scene between Abdul-Mateen and Hamilton -- in those moments, the movie is populated with real people and genuine emotion.

But too often, especially as the violence gets more intense, Sascha Penn's screenplay is content to skim the surface, offering us the familiar cliches of the 1960s civil rights movie. And when he does veer away from cliches, he does so in improbable ways. Is it really likely that Agent Strider would need to have Malcolm X's "by any means" philosophy explained to him, or that a dimwitted Mafioso would be the one to do it?

And the even bigger problem, the one that really sinks the movie, is the casting of Mark Wahlberg as the Mafia hitman. Wahlberg dives cheerfully into full "dese/dem/dose" mode, playing the cartoon version of a violent thug; you get a better, more nuanced portrayal of evil from Foghorn Leghorn in Coyote vs. Acme.

I mostly liked Bratton's first feature film, The Inspection,  a semi-autobiographical story of a gay Black man in Marines basic training. It had the typical problems of a first film, but as is (mostly) true in this movie, Bratton got strong performances from a smartly chosen cast. I'm happy to see that his work on that movie has gotten him the opportunity to work with bigger names and a larger budget. Given his usually sharp eye for finding the right actors, I'd be willing to bet that Wahlberg was foisted on him by a studio that wanted at least one possible box-office draw (albeit a somewhat faded one) in a big role.

I am hugely skeptical about the "true story" aspect of this movie; its unusually violent version of a "white savior" narrative is extremely icky; and there is no getting past the sheer awfulness of Wahlberg's performance. But the things that do work here are enough to keep me interested in following Bratton's career