We’re at the end of summer and near festival season, so our Paul takes a look at By Any Means, now in major release in North America.
About: Based on a true story, a young Black FBI agent (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is sent into 1960s Mississippi to investigate a wave of brutal killings targeting civil rights leaders. Forced to work alongside notorious mafia hitman Greg Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg), he finds himself pulled into a deadly hunt where justice and vengeance begin to blur. When the system is broken, two men divided by everything agree on one thing: the law has limits. They don’t.
Reaction: At one level, this is an offensive white saviour story of how a rough and tumble Italian FBI agent came down to Mississippi to teach a by-the-book black agent how to really deal with local bullies, also known as the KKK. Use a baseball bat to interrogate, and ram a cocked pistol down their throats if they don’t cough up evidence, seems to summarize the advice given. In a rather shocking early scene, the character played by a virtually unrecognizable Mark Wahlberg sets the tone, by shooting a traffic cop dead in his boots when the latter shows signs of getting uppity. With a puffy face, a fake nose, a toothpick in his mouth at all times, and a 55 year-old body completely pumped up from steroid use, Wahlberg actually plays a real-life mob hitman who was recruited by the FBI in the 1960s to beat info out of KKKers when traditional methods were deemed inefffective. His name was Gregory Sciappa and he worked for years as an FBI informant even while he functioned as a high level hit man for the mob. It is reputed that he was responsible for beating witnesses using the above-listed methods, which lead to the locating of the three bodies of the civil rights workers in a story that was depicted in the (much superior) Mississippi Burning. According to By Any Means, he was also allegedly recruited to help solve the murder of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer Sr., which eventually lead to the arrrest of KKK imperial wizard Samuel Bowers. The problem is that the film just celebrates brutality, as the only possible way of combatting racist violence. The black FBI partner is a completely fictional character, so when his evolution from a law and order man into a fellow brute (“It took you long enough” exclaims wise guy Sciappa) who decides to torture witnesses to elicit confessions is presented as a kumbaya moment, it is profoundly offensive. Wahlberg doesn’t help things much by mumbling many of his lines rather unintelligibly. This is really a violent vigilante movie masquerading as a civil rights justice tale. Martin Luther King would be rolling in his grave. This a Paramount release in the US. Paramount’s David Ellison has promised a combined release schedule of no less than 30 movies a year if he is allowed to buy Warner Brothers. If that means thirty red meat movies like this every year, we’d all be better off without them.
Rating: 5 out of 10
