What do you get when you pair a stoic black FBI agent in 1960s Mississippi with a sociopathic Italian hitman? The result, in By Any Means, is a highly entertaining buddy-cop action comedy starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Mark Wahlberg as the unlikeliest of partners.
Loosely inspired by real events, By Any Means follows Wayne Strider, an FBI agent and detective from Chicago, sent back to the bureau in his hometown in Mississippi. Abdul-Mateen plays Strider as the sort of quiet stoic accustomed to hostile territory, like the American drug agents operating in cartel-controlled Colombia in Narcos. Flashing an FBI badge in the South in 1966, he may as well be telling people he is, in fact, a time traveler from 2010, when a black man is president of the United States. Strider knows when to pick his fights. At one crime scene, a local police officer simply scoffs at his badge and tells him to scram — a justifiable invitation to pugilism, but Abdul-Mateen’s blithe indifference makes clear that this sort of dismissal is routine and indulging it would only be counterproductive.
The stakes rise when Vernon Dahmer (Giancarlo Esposito), a prominent black businessman and president of the local NAACP chapter, is murdered by the Ku Klux Klan after working to register black voters. With the FBI struggling to penetrate the local conspiracy, it recruits the decidedly off-the-books talents of Gregory Scarpa. His nickname, “the Grim Reaper,” supplies more useful exposition than any flashback ever could.
Wahlberg plays the menacing mafioso as a performative mashup of Joe Pesci and James Gandolfini. The toothpick, careless swagger, and general blasé attitude feel almost imported from another movie. That incongruity should be jarring against this dark chapter of American history, yet it becomes the film’s great comic asset. Scarpa’s gleeful amorality colliding with Strider’s restraint creates the chemistry that makes the film.
Director Elegance Bratton also finds something revealing in the klan’s resentment. Sam Bowers (Ethan Embry), embittered by Dahmer’s prosperity against his own followers’ pitiful circumstances, sounds like a spiteful socialist. “We have to think about our children’s next meal while he prances in his large home,” he fumes, before invoking the familiar tribal boast that “our ancestors built this country.” It is the philosophical trap of identitarianism. Inheriting distant accomplishments as collective property while treating another man’s success as an indictment of your group. Klansmen holding furtive meetings in toy stores to complain about successful black Americans did not build America, and neither did their defeatist worldview.
It is also good to see Wahlberg back in form after a string of duds, including Play Dirty (2025) and Balls Up (2026). Buddy-cop movies are among his most natural environments; The Other Guys (2010) and 2 Guns (2013) remain two of his best.
By Any Means plays more like Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988), with the slow work of collecting evidence (and what police generally call “building a case”) replaced by Inglourious Basterds‘s (2009) Sgt. Donny Donowitz bashing klansmen with a baseball bat until the evidence presents itself. In that sense, it is a revenge fantasy, and a naturally satisfying one.
There is a simple human pleasure in seeing bad things happen to bad people, even when the heroes administering the punishment are themselves morally dubious. Yet By Any Means is most interesting when it presses against the limits of that satisfaction. Strider believes in law and procedure because he understands what their absence looks like. Scarpa regards procedure as an obstacle between him and the desired result.
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At the peak of their incongruous personalities colliding (via their fists), Strider lambasts Scarpa as “worse than the Klansmen,” adding, “At least they believe in something.” It is in moments like this that the film teases greater depth but never fully commits to it. After white-hooded Klansmen raid Strider’s home in an attempt to thwart his investigation, however, he is forced to reconsider the distinction.
Through its visceral interrogations and beatings, By Any Means asks when violence becomes an acceptable substitute for procedure. Strider and Scarpa embody competing instincts associated with the civil-rights era: Martin Luther King Jr.’s faith in law and nonviolence, and Malcolm X’s willingness to secure justice “by any means necessary,” the phrase that lends the film its title. Their partnership ultimately suggests that justice sometimes requires force, but force without principle quickly becomes vengeance. Equal protection and due process matter most when enforcing them is difficult; otherwise, justice is merely the preference of whoever happens to be holding the baseball bat.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.