Mark Wahlberg’s New Vigilante Thriller Falls Into A Familiar Hollywood Trap

Vernon Dahmer Sr. of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, was a businessman, a father, and a civil rights leader. In the 1960s, he focused on helping black people register to vote, even paying the poll taxes for those who couldn’t afford them. The Ku Klux Klan rewarded Dahmer for his work by firebombing his home, his car, and his grocery store on January 10, 1966. He died in the hospital the next day. These are facts, as is the fact that Greg Scarpa Sr. was a mobster from New York.

What’s less provable is Scarpa’s involvement with the FBI, specifically as a strongman who operated outside of the law when the bureau was having trouble gathering intel. G-men had a set of rules they were expected to abide by, and while history has shown they didn’t always do so, they likely did refrain from extracting confessions from the business end of a baseball bat. For “By Any Means,” a movie based on the murder of Vernon Dahmer and Scarpa’s possible involvement in bringing his killers to justice, historical veracity isn’t important. The story is more about the racial strife of the time period and the limits to which good men can be pushed before they break. 

Scarpa was quite possibly never a good man and instead a vicious sociopath, but he was not the one being tested, nor was much backstory given to him. In the film, that burden rested on the shoulders of fictitious FBI agent Wayne Strider, a black man working for the bureau in Mississippi. Strider occupied a different moral universe than did Scarpa, one where there was a clear delineation between right and wrong, where men could bring justice without wading into the gray area between the two poles. 

Wading into the gray area is an ethical dilemma that most humans face at least once in their lives. Savage beatings and murder, however, are not acts that normally accompany it. In “By Any Means,” from the moment Strider picks up Scarpa from his motel room, he finds his moral code constantly challenged by Scarpa’s insistence on occupying that space, beginning when Scarpa murders a police officer who wrongly pulls them over. 

Strider wants to call it in; Scarpa wants to leave the scene. He prevails by preying upon the stereotypes of the time, telling Strider he would blame the murder on him. That no one ever reports or investigates that murder goes unexplained, as does the absence of any other people any time Scarpa starts cracking skulls. 

It is not his first time in Mississippi, according to the movie and to legend. He was supposedly sent in 1964 to find the bodies of three civil rights activists. This is how the movie opens, with Scarpa and his baseball bat brutally beating a man in order to extract the location of the bodies from him. He succeeds, so he is sent back to do the same for Dahmer. 

Which is how he ends up with Strider, who was bored sitting at his desk in the file room and hoping to do more. It was also personal for Strider, as Dahmer was a friend of his. He can also find things that Scarpa can’t, for the black neighbors who saw the getaway car weren’t going to talk to any white people.

Scarpa and Strider make progress, but their relationship grows increasingly fraught, with them getting in a fistfight before Strider abandons Scarpa on the side of the road. This results in Strider losing his badge. That is the moment when his moral code shifts away from following the rules to going for results. 

Not that he hasn’t been primed. During an earlier moment, Scarpa picked up a copy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Why We Can’t Wait.” The book is emblematic of Strider’s approach to justice, to helping his fellow black men succeed through the power of words and action. For Scarpa, it is an impediment. He exhorted Strider to look instead to Malcolm X and his admonition to fight for those goals “by any means necessary.” 

This was a bit much. Scarpa could have made the same point in a different way. Or the filmmakers could have gone with a different title rather than hammering it home with stilted dialog, but the filmmakers were really the weak link in “By Any Means.” 

Mark Wahlberg as Scarpa is generally solid, though the prosthetics he wears, including a giant nose, are distracting. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, portraying Strider, was not similarly encumbered, but his character wasn’t written in a way that gave him the breathing room necessary for his evolution. Early in the investigation, he is respectful of segregation, initially refusing to go into a whites only gun store. 

By the end, he is fully in Scarpa’s camp, embracing a “by any means necessary” ethos, completely unperturbed by racial mores of the day. His journey from upright agent to vigilante mostly just happens. Viewers see hints of the transformation, and there is a clear impetus. But we never knew Strider well enough to appreciate what should have been a gut-wrenching decision. 

Watching movies almost always requires some level of suspension of disbelief. The six-shooter never runs out of bullets. Nobody notices the car chase going on around them or the cars careening into the ditch. The fistfights and gun battles rouse zero suspicion. Normally, it’s not an issue, but it was a problem for “By Any Means.” The lack of semblance to any sort of reality pulled me out of the movie and reminded me I was in a theater.

There were also pacing issues, with the story unfolding both too quickly and too slowly. The dialog was often stiff and cliched, as though the writers used AI to craft mildly racist quips for Scarpa to lob at Strider. A scene in a diner actually included Scarpa telling Strider, “You people know how to fry things.” 

This is a shame because the source material is so interesting. While liberties are a requirement when translating reality to the screen, in “By Any Means,” a very serious and very bizarre story is reduced to a weak imitation of “Inglourious Basterds,” but without the same punch. There are moments of success, and moments when the audience laughed, but it felt more like a movie I was supposed to enjoy rather than one I truly enjoyed. 

That puts me in the minority, which is fine. I am not here to dictate what people can and cannot enjoy, nor am I here to tell the filmmakers what movie they should have made. I am also going to refrain from asking them to explain how Strider is magically reinstated after going vigilante alongside Scarpa. But a movie about a mobster whose nickname was the “Grim Reaper,” the Ku Klux Klan, murder, and retribution offered a chance for a serious exploration of what motivates men to pursue the paths they trod, to dig into the space between good and evil, and seriously ask if the ends justify the means. “By Any Means” hinted at doing just that but never got around to actually weighing in on those questions and instead served up rather schlocky entertainment.

***

Rich Cromwell is a writer living in Northwest Arkansas. He produces the Cookin’ Up a Story podcast, which you can listen to here. You can also follow him on X: @rcromwell4.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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