By Any Means Review: Mark Wahlberg Powers a 6.5 Out of 10 Held Back by Its Ending and Its Villains

Published 5 September 2026. Words like "tonight" or "next week" refer to that date.

By Any Means is good. That is the frustrating part, because for most of its running time this movie knows exactly what it wants to be, points right at it, and then does not quite get there. I saw it at a press screening downtown, this is my spoiler free review, and I am putting my number right up front: it is a 6.5 out of 10 for me. I have three things it does well and two things I could not get past, and the ending is the biggest reason the score is not higher.

The setup is 1966 Mississippi. A civil rights leader is dead, the FBI cannot get one Klansman to say a word, and the bureau's answer is to fly in a hitman from Brooklyn whose actual job is killing people. That is the movie on the poster, and I would watch that movie. But there is another guy in the car, the Black agent sent along to hold the leash, and when the hitman is done he gets on a plane back to Brooklyn. The agent grew up in that town. He has to stay. That is the real movie.

The pedigree behind By Any Means is real

Elegance Bratton directed this, and if you do not know the name, he made The Inspection for A24 about his own life as a homeless kid who joined the Marines, which got him a Gotham nomination and three Independent Spirit nominations. Before that he was a combat cameraman in the Marine Corps for six years. This is a guy who has held a camera under real pressure.

The screenwriter has a story credit on Creed 2 and created other series before this. The score is by Terence Blanchard, two time Oscar nominee for BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods, seven Grammys, Spike Lee's composer going back to Jungle Fever, and the first Black composer to have an opera staged at the Met. The editor cut Judas and the Black Messiah. When you hire those people, you are announcing what you are trying to make, and I respect the announcement.

Mark Wahlberg's Gregory Scarpa is the engine, and the bench behind him is deep

Wahlberg plays Gregory Scarpa, a real Colombo family hitman who, according to the book this is built on, the FBI quietly kept on the payroll for 26 years to do the things it could not be caught doing. Wahlberg is genuinely funny in this. He walks into 1966 Mississippi like a man who has never once in his life been afraid of anybody, and every room he walks into becomes a different room. Every time he is on screen, the engine is running.

The supporting cast is deep too. David Strathairn, an Oscar nominee for Good Night and Good Luck, plays the FBI director. Josh Lucas of A Beautiful Mind, Ford v Ferrari and Yellowstone is his deputy. Nicole Beharie, who won the Gotham for Miss Juneteenth and got an Emmy nomination for The Morning Show, plays a striver's wife who is a fully formed person, which the wife in a movie like this usually is not. LaChanze has a Tony for The Color Purple, Lisa Gay Hamilton is from The Practice, and Giancarlo Esposito, six time Emmy nominee, plays Vernon Dahmer, and he is brilliant.

A period piece shot in Atlanta that reads like a real place

The cars, the clothes, the storefronts, the light, they committed, and this was shot right here in Atlanta. The town does not read like one of those Western facade sets where there is nothing behind the doors. It reads like a place. Bratton's direction is clear and clean, and I never once lost track of where I was or who wanted what, and in a movie with this many people lying to each other, that is not nothing.

Vernon Dahmer's scene is the third thing this movie gets right

Vernon Dahmer is a real man, the NAACP president in Forrest County, Mississippi, murdered by the Klan in January of 1966. His family is in the news right now because his son has a petition up asking Paramount to add a disclaimer to this film. I read the whole petition, and I plan to put what they said next to what I actually saw in a deeper piece later this week, because they deserve that and so do you. What I will say today is that there is a scene involving Mr. Dahmer that I think this movie got right, and I do not say that lightly.

The faces do not all match, and I do not understand the prosthetic nose

My first problem is faces. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is the co-lead here, and he acts his part off, but everybody else on that screen looks like they came out of 1966, and he looks like he walked in off a modern set. You can get away with that when you are Denzel, who has earned the right to just be Denzel whether he is in ancient Greece or Rome. Abdul-Mateen is too young and too early in his career to ask for that pass, and it costs the movie every time he is in a wide shot next to someone who did the work.

On the other side of that coin, they put a fake nose on Wahlberg, and my problem is not the nose, it is why they needed it. People will say it is so he looks more like the character, but he already looks like the character. Wahlberg has his own makeup artist on this picture, Allan Apone, an Emmy winner who trained under Stan Winston and did Wahlberg's prosthetics on Uncharted and Spencer Confidential. When a star brings his own prosthetics guy, the star gets a prosthetic. I think that is the star's department, and it is the lead who did not need the help.

A villain problem leaves the movie with nothing to push against

The second thing is the bad guys, and I want to be fair because these are working actors with real resumes. The man playing Lawrence Byrd has been in Selma and The Blind Side, the sheriff actor was in Foxcatcher and Tulsa King, and the deputies have fifty credits between them. These guys can act, that is not the problem. The problem is you have Strathairn, Lucas and Esposito, a Tony winner, on one side of the table, and on the other side you have faces you recognize but could not name in a lineup.

Like they say in wrestling, the face is fine, but it is really the heel that makes the face matter, and without a strong bad guy it starts to fall apart because you find it hard to believe. How I would have done it is take one of those name actor slots on the bureau side and spend it across the table instead, one recognizable face on the Klan side who scares you before he opens his mouth. The casting office on this picture also cast Stranger Things and Ozark, so the talent was in the building. This was a choice about where the money went. Maybe they ran out, I have no idea, but either way it hurt.

An ending that runs out of story before it runs out of movie

There is one more thing, and I think it is the biggest one. It is the last fifteen minutes, and specifically the last ten. I cannot tell you what happens, since this is spoiler free, but I can tell you it is the difference between the number I am giving today and a number a full point higher. As a filmmaker myself, I know exactly what I would have done instead.

My final score: 6.5 out of 10

Wahlberg is a wonderful character, and he is funny. The bench behind him is real, the period is real, the director is clear, and there is a scene about a real man that they handled with more care than I expected walking in. What holds it back is a co-lead who never once looks like 1966, a villain problem that leaves the movie with nothing to push against, and an ending that runs out of story before it runs out of movie. It does the thing it is trying to do, it just does not do all of it well. The hitman gets to go home. The agent has to live there. That is the movie, and for about ninety minutes, they knew it. If you have seen a film you think handled this era better, which one is it?