‘By Any Means’ Review: A Mississippi Manhunt That Can’t Decide If It Wants to Sting or Swing

Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II headline this new crime thriller from director Elegance Bratton, dropping into theaters as summer counterprogramming with a premise that sounds almost too good to pass up. Set in 1966 Mississippi, the film follows a young Black FBI agent forced into an uneasy alliance with a mafia hitman turned informant while hunting down the killers of a civil rights leader.

The pairing of a by-the-book federal agent and a violent, morally compromised enforcer against the backdrop of Klan terror is the kind of high concept that could sustain an entire series, let alone a two hour movie. Bratton, working from a script by Sascha Penn, clearly understands the weight of the history he is dramatizing, and the opening stretch grounds itself in period detail with real intention.

That grounding does not last. Once the plot machinery kicks in, ‘By Any Means’ pivots hard into pulpy, propulsive revenge territory, and the tonal whiplash between somber historical drama and shoot first popcorn entertainment never fully resolves itself. It is a film pulling in two directions at once, and neither side wins outright.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is the film’s steadiest hand. His agent carries genuine conflict, torn between institutional duty and the fury of watching justice move at a crawl while bodies pile up, and he sells every ounce of that tension without overplaying it. Wahlberg, meanwhile, leans into pure bluster, all clenched jaw and simmering menace, and while it is entertaining in bursts, it rarely feels like a fully formed person is underneath the performance.

The supporting cast fares better than the screenplay deserves. Giancarlo Esposito brings gravity to a role that could have been a footnote, and David Strathairn slots into the kind of quietly authoritative part he could play in his sleep. The problem is that almost none of these characters get room to breathe beyond their function in the plot, which flattens what should be a story about people into a story about incidents.

Where the film stumbles hardest is in its handling of violence and history as spectacle. Scenes meant to convey the brutality of the era sometimes tip into stylized catharsis instead, and the effect is uncomfortable in a way that feels unintentional. A story this rooted in real atrocity deserves a steadier hand than the one guiding its bloodier set pieces, and the film’s insistence on having it both ways, prestige drama and vigilante thriller, keeps undercutting its own ambitions.

Cinematographer Ante Cheng gives Mississippi a sun bleached, oppressive look that does a lot of quiet storytelling on its own, and Terence Blanchard’s score adds a mournful undercurrent that the script itself sometimes forgets to earn. When the visuals and music align with the material’s weight, the movie hints at the sharper film buried inside it. Those moments just do not add up to enough.

By the time the investigation reaches its resolution, the film has traded most of its historical texture for a fairly conventional shootout structure, and the closing act feels rushed compared to the patience of the opening. It wants to land as both a gut punch about America’s past and a satisfying genre exercise, and stretching for both leaves it a little short of each.

I walked away from ‘By Any Means‘ appreciating its ambition more than its execution, carried by a genuinely committed lead performance from Abdul-Mateen II and a premise that deserved a tighter, braver script. It is a watchable, occasionally gripping thriller that never quite figures out what kind of movie it wants to be, and that indecision keeps it from being memorable. My score lands at 7 out of 10.

Have you seen ‘By Any Means’ yet, and does this partnership between agent and hitman work for you? Drop your take in the comments.