By Any Means review

I really enjoyed this one. The movie is built around the murder of Vernon Dahmer, a Black businessman and civil-rights leader in Mississippi who was killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan after helping Black people in his community pay their poll taxes. A Black FBI agent is trying to investigate the murder, but the problem is that the FBI is basically wholly ineffective on the ground in Mississippi. Local law enforcement isn't cooperating, some of it is outright corrupt, and the FBI doesn't have an easy way to get anything done without directly fighting with the same police departments they're supposed to be working with.

Eventually pressure starts coming from the top. Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover want some action on these murders, they want the situation calmed down, and they want results. So the FBI does what it does best and goes dark. They send in Greg Scarpa, an FBI informant who's also a hitman connected to the Italian mob and who had already been used by the Bureau in Mississippi before. Now you've got a Black FBI agent trying to solve a civil-rights murder with a professional mob hitman as his partner, and that's really where the movie gets interesting.

Scarpa spends a lot of the movie basically mansplaining to this Black man how he should be dealing with racism, bigotry and white supremacist violence in his own hometown. I don't know if mansplaining is exactly the right word for it, but that's basically what he's doing. Scarpa thinks the FBI agent needs to be more aggressive, needs to stand up for himself and basically needs to be more of a man about it. Of course, Scarpa's idea of standing up for yourself is murdering all the racists and bigots, because he's a professional murderer and that's how he solves problems. Somebody threatens you, kill them. Somebody hurts your family, kill them. If these people are terrorizing your community, why are we still talking about it? Kill them.

The FBI agent sees things differently for pretty obvious reasons. There are consequences when you start using violence, and he's concerned about what happens to his family and to the Black community after everything goes dark. Scarpa doesn't really have to care about that because he's not the person who's going to have to live there afterward. He can come into Mississippi, do whatever he thinks needs to be done and leave. Everybody else has to deal with what comes next.

That's really what the movie turns on for me. It's the difference between pursuing justice and pursuing retribution, and how quickly eye-for-an-eye tactics can take you somewhere very dark even when you agree with the reason somebody started down that road. The movie goes considerably darker than I expected too. There's torture used pretty aggressively, the FBI is operating in corrupt ways, which isn't particularly surprising given the history, and your protagonists do some nasty, mean and sometimes evil things in pursuit of a goal that most people watching the movie are probably going to agree with.

I imagine that people are going to have problems with different parts of this movie from all kinds of different angles, and that's fine. I try not to get too caught up in that while I'm watching something. I'm watching a movie, and as a movie I think this is very well done. More importantly, this is the kind of movie I like seeing with a group because you come out afterward with things to talk about. Sometimes everybody walks out, says the movie was good and you go eat. Other times something in the movie has triggered a thought in everybody's head and you end up talking about it afterward. This was one of those movies.

The people I saw it with really liked it, and so did I. I think it's getting a little short shrift critically, maybe because it's provocative in ways that aren't going to sit comfortably with everybody, but that's part of what I liked about it. It's darker than I expected, it gives you something to think and talk about afterward, and the true story underlying all of this is fascinating to begin with. I definitely recommend it.