‘By Any Means’ Is Torture in Every Sense

I have a little tradition whenever I go to the movies. When the film ends and the credits roll, I stay in my seat. As the lights come up in the theater, I watch the full credits all the way to the end. It’s a sign of silent respect. I can give an extra five minutes of my time for people who labored months or years piecing together magic from light. But the moment “By Any Means” ended I vaulted out of my seat and got the hell out of the theater.The majority of the people who made this movie do not deserve my respect. They did not deserve five minutes of my time after wasting nearly two hours of it on an ugly, nihilistic, tedious, depressing, boring film.This film is torture, literally and figuratively. There’s a prelude of kneecap smashing by Mob hitman Gregory Scarpa Sr. (Mark Wahlberg). The body of the movie has three more torture scenes, leading up to the big torture scene that’s supposed to be the satisfying climax. Calling it torture porn is an insult to pornography.The film luxuriates in brutality and suffering, trying to pass off smashed skulls and destroyed kneecaps as satisfying emotional catharsis because the men being tortured are racists. And in a Hollywood where Harvey Weinstein was enabled for decades but Roseanne Barr was canceled for one tweet, the worst thing you can be is a racist.The movie, directed by Elegance Bratton, is both overwrought and underwritten. The direction is barely competent. Its moral compass is so broken it’s like someone just gave up and threw it away. When it isn’t grotesquely violent, it’s insultingly simplistic in ways that made me angry.The plot is a heavily fictionalized, a maybe-true-but-probably-not story set in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. When the FBI has a murder of a civil rights leader that they can’t solve, they send for Mr. Scarpa, a Mafia capo who is also a high-level FBI informant. Mr. Scarpa operates off the books and outside the law — by any means necessary, see? — to crack the case by cracking skulls.He’s paired with rookie FBI Agent Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a Black Mississippi native who’s returned home to bring justice to the people who are terrorizing his community. When his boss pairs him with Mr. Scarpa, together the mismatched duo will bring their clashing personalities and working styles together to take down the Ku Klux Klan.The obvious ancestor to this story is “In the Heat of the Night” — the Oscar-winning 1967 classic that shot Sidney Poitier to superstardom as Hollywood’s first Black leading man. “By Any Means” plays as a version of “In the Heat of the Night” but written and directed by morons. “I will tell you when you’re done” is no “They call me Mr. Tibbs.”The one bright spot in the film is Mr. Abdul-Mateen. He is a compelling screen presence and does a decent job playing an underwritten character. The smoldering anger at injustice that lurks just beneath his laconic exterior is the best character work in the movie. It’s also the only three-dimensional character work in the picture.Yet Mr. Abdul-Mateen is poorly served by a script that yanks his character around and makes the man seem inconsistent. First, he’s demanding Mr. Scarpa do things by the book. Then, he joins in on a beating. Then, he’s pointing a gun at Mr. Scarpa to stop the torture. Yes, Agent Strider is supposed to be conflicted over his role in the brutal operation, but the script gives Mr. Abdul-Mateen so little to play that he just seems erratic.Unfortunately, viewers will go to this movie to see Mr. Wahlberg. His live-wire charisma is buried under a massive prosthetic nose, dark sunglasses and a Tom Cruise wig. The script tries to sanitize his character with a perfunctory dinner scene with his wife and children early in the movie. The character is racist by modern standards, but also less racist than a Made Man born in 1928 would be.The real Greg Scarpa Sr. was probably far worse in real life. And the fact that the movie tries to make a man who’s believed to have killed 60 people into a plucky anti-hero is the offensive assumption on which the movie rests.I also took offense to the violence. Not every violent movie is bad. But the violence needs to serve a purpose in the story beyond vicarious wish fulfilment for Hollywood liberals who need more therapy. We have seen film characters stabbed, beaten and pistol-whipped before. We have seen characters tortured. Quentin Tarantino had one character cut another’s ear off in “Reservoir Dogs.” That film is a classic.But in “By Any Means,” antagonists strapped down to chairs are grotesquely tortured in endless scenes that seem to relish every broken bone and bleeding vein. And it’s not just the extensive cracks and crunches of snapping kneecaps and broken skulls that are repulsive — it’s the many, many closeups of bleeding, mangled, sobbing, pleading faces that the movie thinks should get our rocks off. Make sure you charge your phone or wear a watch you like if you go see this movie. Because you will be looking down at it repeatedly to figure out how much longer until the film is over.“I don’t like this,” Agent Strider’s wife Allison (Nicole Beharie) says late in the film. Finally there was a character I could relate to.

‘By Any Means’ Is Torture in Every Sense

‘By Any Means’ Is Torture in Every Sense

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