Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen Lead Riveting Civil Rights-Era Crime Thriller By Any Means, Arriving This September

If you like your crime dramas tangled up with real history and a solid dose of 'wait, they really did that?', Paramount just picked up something that might be right up your alley. 'By Any Means', a thriller set in Mississippi in 1966, is rolling out in the US on September 4—and it's got a cast and premise that sound tailor-made for people who like their genre movies with teeth.

Crime, Conspiracies, and One Wild Partnership

The movie brings together Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (the guy’s everywhere lately) as two guys who could not be more different on paper: Wahlberg as a mafia hitman, and Abdul-Mateen as a young Black FBI agent. The twist? These two are more frenemies than friends, forced to work together to go after the people responsible for murdering civil rights leaders. Naturally, that means digging through the ugliest corners of the system, and it’s never clear who’s using who—or who might get out alive.

This one comes from director Elegance Bratton, who’s getting more attention after 'The Inspection', and it’s scripted by Sascha Penn (he’s been busy with ‘Power Book III: Raising Kanan’, which is a totally different flavor of crime story).

'This is a story about unlikely alliances forged under impossible circumstances—where justice is not clean, and the truth comes at a cost. I wanted to explore what it means to confront violence not just as an act, but as a system—and what it demands of those caught inside it,' Bratton said in a statement.

Based on History, But Definitely Not Sanitized

Here’s the real history behind all this: In the 1960s, the disappearance (and murder) of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner was one of those watershed moments in the Civil Rights Movement. The FBI knew something terrible had happened, but the local authorities weren’t exactly rushing to help—and nobody could find the victims’ bodies. So the Bureau turned to Gregory Scarpa, a guy whose resume read 'hitman for the Colombo crime family, FBI informant, occasional enthusiast of punching information out of people.' Scarpa’s 'interrogation methods' were basically violence with zero sugarcoating, but apparently, they got results.

If you have a feeling you’ve seen this in another movie, you’re not imagining things—'Mississippi Burning' (the Gene Hackman-Willem Dafoe flick) pulls from the same grim true story, just with its own Hollywood spin. 'By Any Means' promises to dive deeper and feel grittier, at least if Bratton’s public statements are anything to go by.

Now for Something Completely Different: Wahlberg Goes Comedy

Because apparently Mark Wahlberg never sleeps, you’ll see him in a very different gear this spring. He’s teaming up with director Peter Farrelly for 'Balls Up', which looks like it’s going for 'impossible to ignore, probably not safe for work' levels of comedy.

• Wahlberg stars as Brad, working alongside Paul Walter Hauser’s Elijah. These two marketing guys make the questionable decision to pitch a World Cup condom sponsorship. (That’s not subtle, but subtlety is not the vibe here.)
• The problem: Their boozy celebration triggers an international incident, and now they’re dodging angry fans, criminals, and just about every authority figure you can picture.
• 'Balls Up' lands on Prime Video April 15.

So, between righteous crime drama and off-the-wall comedy, Wahlberg is covering all his cinematic bases this year—and, honestly, you probably haven’t seen a single marketing decision spiral this badly since 'Mad Men' left TV.