Elegance Bratton pairs Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Mark Wahlberg in civil rights thriller By Any Means

Investigative premise and character pairing

Director Elegance Bratton and screenwriter Sascha Penn bring the 1966 murder of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer Sr. to the screen in the action thriller "By Any Means," developed from Penn's Black List script. The narrative pairs Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a straitlaced Black FBI agent stationed in a Mississippi file room after relocating from Chicago, with Gregory Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg), a violent Brooklyn mafia hitman brought south to work outside legal boundaries. The pair receive strict warnings that nobody can know about their unauthorized operation. Their collaboration unfolds in a jurisdiction where the Ku Klux Klan operates openly within local police departments, leading federal officials to bypass traditional warrants in order to crack the case.

Factual background and federal response

The story is rooted in the aftermath of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, when eleven southern states introduced annual poll taxes to disenfranchise poor Black communities. In January 1966, Dahmer (Giancarlo Esposito), leader of the Hattiesburg, Mississippi chapter of the NAACP, announced that he would personally pay poll fees for local residents unable to afford the expense.

It's a proclamation that we here, that we matter

Following Dahmer's death when Klansmen firebombed his family home, President Lyndon B. Johnson instructed federal authorities to solve the murder without delay. Mississippi FBI chief Roy (David Strathairn) summons Scarpa, an active Colombo family figure and confidential informant for J. Edgar Hoover's bureau. While Scarpa is a real-life figure who previously extracted information regarding the 1964 disappearance of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, the agency never formally acknowledged the arrangement. Strider is an invented composite standing in for several local Black agents who faced institutional racism from superiors while striving to enforce the law.

I believe in justice, and I believe Negroes have to be a part in getting it

Ideological clashes and visual style

The production contrasts mismatched buddy-cop dynamics with explicit depictions of Jim Crow violence, drawing structural comparisons to the 1988 film "Mississippi Burning." The screenplay introduces fish-out-of-water humor amid the brutality, featuring scenes where Scarpa invites Strider to a crummy motel and nicknames his partner Jackie Robinson. Strider in turn educates the mafioso on local racial slurs, explaining that the term cracker means salty with no flavor. Ideologically, Scarpa rejects the nonviolent strategy of Martin Luther King Jr., favoring Malcolm X's philosophy of achieving justice by any means necessary. When Strider asks what Scarpa would do against the Klan if he were Black, the enforcer gives a direct reply.

I'd kill them all. Every last one.

Bratton, whose previous feature was the military drama "The Inspection," moves away from muted palettes to capture sun-drenched Mississippi landscapes. The film opens with archival news footage before transitioning to Scarpa beating a captive in a warehouse with a baseball bat, synchronizing the three words of the title to the physical impacts. Wahlberg portrays the enforcer with a prosthetic nose, an ever-present toothpick, a white tank top, and sunglasses worn at night, while Abdul-Mateen charts Strider's progression from a rule-bound desk investigator into a participant in armed confrontations.