TL;DR: A morally knotty historical thriller powered by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, By Any Means sacrifices some character depth and catharsis for a far more interesting question: how dirty can the pursuit of justice become before justice itself starts losing meaning?

Historical dramas often arrive carrying the weight of hindsight. We know which side history eventually condemns, we know which institutions failed, and we know the language future generations will use to describe the injustice. By Any Means is more interested in something considerably messier: what happens when knowing what is right doesn’t give you any clean way of achieving it. Elegance Bratton’s 1966 Mississippi-set thriller turns that dilemma into a grim collision between civil rights history and crime noir, with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Mark Wahlberg occupying opposite ends of its moral battlefield.

The result is a film I admire precisely because it refuses to become the reassuring version of this story. There are no easy morality buffs to equip, no dialogue wheel where choosing the heroic response magically unlocks the best ending. Instead, By Any Means keeps asking how much of yourself you can compromise while pursuing justice before the methods begin contaminating the mission. It doesn’t answer that question neatly, and while that occasionally leaves the film feeling frustratingly incomplete, the discomfort is also where its power lives.

By Any Means turns justice into its most dangerous moral question

At the centre of By Any Means is Wayne Strider (Abdul-Mateen), an FBI agent returning to Mississippi after the murder of a civil rights leader. His investigation puts him alongside Gregory Scarpa (Wahlberg), an enforcer connected to the Colombo crime family whose usefulness to the FBI comes from his willingness to operate well outside the boundaries Strider believes should matter. That’s enough premise to suggest a familiar mismatched-partners thriller, but Bratton isn’t particularly interested in giving us the historical equivalent of a buddy-cop movie.

Instead, the tension comes from what Scarpa represents to Strider. Strider believes in law and justice, yet the world around him repeatedly exposes the distance between those two concepts. When institutions are compromised and violence is treated casually by those protecting the status quo, obeying the rules can begin to look less like morality and more like surrender. The film’s smartest move is refusing to pretend that crossing those lines suddenly becomes righteous simply because the opposition is worse.

That makes By Any Means considerably more uncomfortable than a straightforward revenge thriller would have been. There is satisfaction inherent in seeing cruel people confronted, but the movie keeps poisoning that satisfaction with questions about methods, consequences and institutional hypocrisy. It understands that audiences naturally want justice while simultaneously challenging the fantasy that justice always arrives wearing clean gloves. That’s thorny territory, and the movie is strongest whenever it refuses to provide an emotional cheat code.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II gives the movie its conscience

This moral conflict works largely because Abdul-Mateen gives Strider an internal struggle that feels more important than the mechanics of the investigation. He isn’t playing a naïve man discovering injustice for the first time. What matters is the erosion of certainty: watching someone who believes the system should mean something confront circumstances where its limitations become impossible to ignore. Abdul-Mateen gives that conflict enough weight that Strider remains compelling even when the screenplay doesn’t provide every character around him with comparable depth.

Wahlberg, meanwhile, is operating in a very different register as Scarpa. His swagger and gangster energy give the movie an abrasive counterweight to Strider’s restraint, and that contrast creates far more interesting chemistry than forced friendship would have. Scarpa isn’t positioned as the lovable rogue destined to melt his partner’s resistance; he is useful precisely because he is capable of doing things the FBI cannot openly do. That distinction keeps their relationship prickly and prevents By Any Means from sanding down its ugliest implications merely to make its leads more entertaining together.

The supporting cast includes Giancarlo Esposito, Nicole Beharie, LisaGay Hamilton and LaChanze, and there is plenty of acting muscle surrounding the central duo. The weakness is that the film’s focus on Strider’s dilemma leaves some of those characters functioning more as pieces of his world than fully developed people with equally rich interior lives. At 107 minutes, the film moves efficiently, but I occasionally wished it had spent some of that runtime widening its emotional lens.

Elegance Bratton gives a historical thriller the soul of noir

Bratton’s genre choices are where By Any Means becomes more distinctive than its premise initially suggests. Rather than treating the material exclusively as prestigious historical drama, he borrows the unease and moral contamination of noir. That’s an inspired fit because noir has always understood something superhero stories occasionally forget: knowing who the villain is doesn’t automatically make the hero pure.

That sensibility also prevents the movie from becoming too polished for its subject. Stylish filmmaking can make darkness seductive, so Bratton’s willingness to let brutality rupture that cinematic control matters. The aesthetic isn’t there simply to make 1960s Mississippi look cool; it supports a world where institutions, criminals and supposedly righteous actors occupy increasingly uncomfortable shades of grey. The filmmaking and themes are pulling in the same direction, which gives the movie an identity beyond being another true-events drama dressed in period clothing.

The trade-off is that By Any Means sometimes feels more interested in its central ethical argument than in building a completely satisfying dramatic shape around it. Its conclusion arrives with deliberate abruptness, and the historical context accompanying the ending reinforces why a neat victory lap would be dishonest. I understand that choice, and intellectually I think it fits. Emotionally, however, there’s still a sense that the credits arrive just as the movie has opened another door worth walking through.

Verdict

By Any Means succeeds because it doesn’t reduce an ugly chapter of American history to a comfortable story about good people defeating bad ones. Elegance Bratton uses the machinery of a noir-inflected thriller to interrogate the uncomfortable gap between legality, morality and justice, while Yahya Abdul-Mateen II provides the conflicted human centre necessary to stop those ideas becoming abstract. Mark Wahlberg makes an effective, abrasive foil, and the strong supporting cast adds weight even when several characters deserved greater development.

Its abbreviated character work and deliberately unresolved quality may frustrate viewers looking for a conventional historical thriller with a cathartic finish. But audiences willing to engage with a film that leaves moral debris scattered across the floor rather than sweeping everything away should find plenty worth discussing. By Any Means isn’t interested in making justice look heroic. It’s interested in asking what justice costs when the system responsible for delivering it has already failed.