‘By Any Means’ Proves Critics and Audiences on Rotten Tomatoes Are Watching Two Completely Different Movies

Historical crime thrillers rarely arrive without baggage, especially when they’re built around uncomfortable real-world subject matter. Pairing genre thrills with civil rights-era violence is a tricky needle to thread, and it’s the exact tightrope ‘By Any Means’ has been walking since its first reviews landed.

Directed by Elegance Bratton and written by Sascha Penn, the film dropped into theaters over Labor Day weekend carrying the weight of two very different expectations. On one side sat critics parsing its handling of sensitive historical material, and on the other sat audiences simply showing up for a Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II team-up.

Those two camps have landed in strikingly different places. While critics have remained split on the film, giving it scores hovering in the mid-to-high 60s on Rotten Tomatoes, general audiences have responded far more enthusiastically, pushing the film’s audience score up to an 88 percent rating on the same platform.

Set in 1966 Mississippi, ‘By Any Means‘ follows a young Black FBI agent, Wayne Strider, played by Abdul-Mateen II, who is sent to investigate a wave of brutal killings targeting civil rights leaders. Strider is forced to team up with Gregory Scarpa, a real-life mafia hitman turned FBI informant played by Wahlberg, as the two men with wildly different moral codes hunt down the killers together.

That central pairing has become the film’s most talked-about element, for better and worse. Critics have repeatedly pointed to a mismatch in tone between the two lead performances, with reviewers noting that Abdul-Mateen II’s grounded, “reliably magnetic” work often feels like it belongs in a different movie than Wahlberg’s broader, more theatrical turn as Scarpa.

Several reviews also flagged Wahlberg’s prosthetic makeup as a distracting choice, while others took issue with how the film handles its heavier historical themes. Some critics argued the movie leans too heavily into pulpy revenge-thriller mechanics at the expense of meaningfully engaging with the civil rights-era violence at its core.

Audiences, however, appear far less concerned with those tonal debates. With hundreds of ratings now logged, the film’s strong audience score reportedly ties Abdul-Mateen II’s career-best numbers alongside titles like ‘Ambulance’, suggesting moviegoers are responding to the film on a purely visceral, entertainment-first level.

The film also marks something of a rebound for Wahlberg, whose recent output, including ‘Balls Up’, ‘The Family Plan 2’, and ‘Play Dirty’, had struggled to win over audiences. ‘By Any Means’ reportedly cracks into his top 10 highest-rated films by audience score, a notable turnaround after that string of more divisive projects.

Supporting the two leads is a cast that includes Nicole Beharie, Josh Lucas, David Strathairn, and Giancarlo Esposito, who plays civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer, whose real-life murder anchors much of the film’s plot. The screenplay draws from a loosely true story, blending genuine historical events with dramatized characters to construct its central investigation.

Currently playing exclusively in theaters through Paramount Pictures, ‘By Any Means’ arrived without a confirmed streaming date, leaving its box office run as the primary measure of its success for now. Whether the disconnect between critics and audiences ultimately helps or hurts the film’s staying power remains to be seen, but the gap itself has already become part of the conversation surrounding it.

For a movie built on the collision of two very different men with two very different methods, it seems fitting that ‘By Any Means’ has sparked an equally divided reaction from the people watching it.