1966, Mississippi. A civil rights leader is dead. The FBI can’t get one Klansman to say one word, and the Bureau’s big idea is to fly in a guy from Brooklyn whose actual job is killing people.

That’s the movie on the poster. And look, that’s a movie. I’d watch that movie.

But there’s another guy in that car. The Black agent they send along to hold the leash. When the hitman’s done, the hitman gets on a plane back to Brooklyn. The agent grew up in that town.

What’s up, my know-it-alls.

Last week I’m sitting downtown with Mrs. Know-It-All at a press screening for By Any Means, the first one I’ve ever been invited to. Everybody from the production could not have been nicer. We took a picture, and that picture is going in a frame. I walked out of there with a set of rules: a date I’m allowed to say I liked it, and a date I’m allowed to tell you why. This is the second date. The embargo just lifted.

I want to be straight about what this is, because it’s a little different from what we usually do here. Normally I’m the guy with the hot take. I dissect what a thing is saying, or at least what it’s doing, and we go deep. That’s still coming, Saturday, with spoilers all over it.

Today is the old job. Somebody who has made movies sits down and tells you whether this one works and why. I’ve produced. I have been in the meeting where somebody asked me to take a budget from five hundred thousand dollars to ten million so the project would be taken seriously. So when I tell you where this movie spent its money and where it didn’t, that isn’t a guess from the cheap seats. That’s the job.

No spoilers here. My number is in it, because I’m not going to make you click twice to find out what I thought.

By Any Means is good. And that’s the frustrating part, because for most of its running time this thing knows exactly what it wants to be. It points right at it. It doesn’t get there.

I want to be precise about that, because I am not here to bury this movie. I liked this movie. Three things it does well, two things I could not get past, and the number for all of it at the end.

The Pedigree Is Real

Start with who made it, because the pedigree on this thing is not decoration.

Elan Bratton directed. If you don’t know the name, he made The Inspection for A24 a few years back, about his own life as a homeless kid who joined the Marines, and it 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 script is Sasha Penn, who created Raising Kanan for Starz and has a story credit on Creed II. The score is Terence Blanchard: two Oscar nominations 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.

I’m telling you all of that because when you hire those people, you’re announcing what you’re trying to make. I respect the announcement.

Then there’s Wahlberg, who is the reason this works at all. He’s playing Gregory Scarpa, a real Colombo family hitman who, according to the book this whole thing is built on, the FBI quietly kept on the payroll for twenty-six years to do the things the FBI couldn’t be caught doing.

And Wahlberg is funny in this. I mean funny. 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. That character is the engine of this movie, and every time he’s on screen the engine is running.

The bench behind him is deep. David Strathairn is the FBI director. Josh Lucas is his deputy. Nicole Beharie plays Strider’s wife and she is a fully formed person in this, which the wife in a movie like this usually isn’t. LaChanze, a Tony winner for The Color Purple. LisaGay Hamilton. And Giancarlo Esposito, six Emmy nominations, is Vernon Dahmer, and he is brilliant.

They Committed to the Period

Second thing: it’s a period piece, and they committed. The cars, the clothes, the storefronts, the light. It was shot right here in Atlanta, and the town does not read like one of those Western facades where there’s nothing behind the doors. It reads like a place.

Bratton’s direction is clear and it’s clean. 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

The third thing matters more than the other two. Vernon Dahmer is in this movie, and he was a real man. He was the NAACP president in Forrest County, Mississippi. The Klan murdered him 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 thing. I’m going to put what they said next to what I saw, because they deserve that and so do you.

What I’ll tell you today is that there is a scene involving Mr. Dahmer that I think this movie got right, and I don’t say that lightly.

(I go a good bit deeper on who Vernon Dahmer actually was and what he was doing that got him killed in this week’s sidebar video for members. If that’s your thing, I hope you’ll join me over there.)

The Face Problem

Now the two things, and the first one is going to get me some mail.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is the co-lead here, and let me be clear before I say anything else: the man acts his butt off in this. But everybody else on that screen looks like they came out of 1966, and he looks like he walked in off the set of Wonder Man. He looks like a modern Black man in a period costume.

You can get away with that when you’re Denzel. Denzel has reached the point where he’s just Denzel, whether he’s in ancient Rome or wherever. He earned that. Abdul-Mateen is too young and too early in his career to ask for that pass, and it costs the movie every single time he’s in a wide shot next to somebody who did the work.

On the other side of that same coin, they put a fake nose on Wahlberg. My problem isn’t the nose. My problem is why you needed it. People are going to say it’s so he looks more like the character. Bro, he looks like the character. Go pull the picture of Gregory Scarpa.

I’ll tell you what I think happened, and it’s right there in the credits. Wahlberg has his own makeup artist on this picture, an Emmy winner who founded his own effects lab, trained under Stan Winston, and did Wahlberg on Uncharted and Spenser Confidential. When the star brings his own prosthetics guy, the star gets a prosthetic. That’s the star’s department. And it’s the lead who didn’t need the help.

The Villain Problem

The second thing is the bad guys, and I want to be fair here, because these are working actors with real resumes. The man playing Lawrence Byrd has been in Selma and The Blind Side. The sheriff was in Foxcatcher and Tulsa King. The deputy has fifty credits. These guys can act. That is not the problem.

The problem is you have Strathairn and Lucas and Esposito and a Tony winner on one side of the table, and on the other side you have every face you recognize but couldn’t name in a lineup.

In a movie about the Klan in Mississippi in ‘66, the villains are the whole opposition. It’s like they say in wrestling: the face is fine, but it’s the heel that makes the face matter. Without a strong bad guy it starts to fall apart, because you find it difficult to believe.

Here’s how I would have done it. You take one of those name-actor slots on the Bureau side and you spend it across the table. One recognizable face on the Klan side. One guy who scares you before he opens his mouth. Then the whole third act has something to push against.

The casting on this picture is the Atlanta office that 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 clue. Either way, it hurt.

The Ending

There’s one more thing, and I think it’s the biggest one. It’s the reason there’s a Saturday video.

It’s the ending. The last fifteen minutes, and specifically the last ten. I can’t tell you what happens. I can tell you it’s the difference between the number I’m about to give you and a number a full point higher. And I can tell you that as a filmmaker, I know exactly what I would have done instead.

Saturday. I promise.

The Verdict

By Any Means lands at a 6.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

Wahlberg is a wonderful character and he’s funny. The bench behind him is real. The period is real. The director is clear. And there’s 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’s trying to do. It just doesn’t do it well.

The hitman gets to go home. The agent has to live there. That’s the movie. And for about ninety minutes, they knew it.

If you see this over the weekend, come back Saturday, because that’s where we actually talk. And if you’ve got a movie you think handled this era better, the conversation lives in the comments on the video above. I keep saying we’ve seen this done better, and I want to know which one you’re thinking of.