Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in By Any Means
BY ANY MEANS
In director Elegance Bratton's By Any Means, a based-on-true-events thriller set in 1966 Mississippi, Mark Wahlberg plays notorious mafia hitman and FBI snitch Greg Scarpa. Until we were presented with a photo of the real-life Scarpa right before the end credits, I didn't really know what the guy looked like, and all throughout Bratton's film, I was driving myself crazy trying to pinpoint who it was that the “unrecognizable” Wahlberg most resembled. Paul L. Smith – the Bluto of Robert Altman's Popeye? John C. Reilly in an inflatable sumo-wrestler costume? A brunette Stretch Armstrong? A few hours after the movie mercifully ended, it finally dawned on me: Alley Oop. That incongruously bulky comic-strip caveman whose jokes are funny only to him.
Credit Bratton and screenwriter Sascha Penn for at least not delaying the sight of Wahlberg's hulking lummox, who is first seen, in a shadowy 1964 prelude, torturing a potential informant before the title blasts on screen, each word of By Any Means appearing with each thunderous whack of Scarpa's baseball bat. (It would've been far easier to laugh at Wahlberg's puffy, makeup-enhanced features had he arrived, sans shadows, later in the story.) The brutal interrogation is of a Klansman who might identify the murderers of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, and might also lead authorities to where the bodies are buried. If you saw Alan Parker's 1988 Oscar winner Mississippi Burning and presumed it was Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe who momentarily cleaned up the Deep South, you may be surprised by how much credit Scarpa is given for licking the case. But yes, in Penn's telling, we actually have an Italian-American gangster from Brooklyn to thank, though it's hard to gauge whom we're to principally blame for this Greg Scarpa being such a distractingly ridiculous buffoon. I do have a theory, though.
Whether Wahlberg's almost comical musculature is the work of prosthetics artists or a training regimen or both, I don't know. (I could search for the information online, but am afraid it would get me on an e-mail chain for the actor's nutrition supplements.) Unless Wahlberg was routinely bashing himself in the face with a two-by-four, Scarpa's bulging proboscis – an obviously phony snout much bigger than the actual Scarpa's – is certainly an on-set augmentation, as is, I'm guessing, his beer gut, given that we never see the man shirtless. But this Scarpa isn't laughable merely because he looks like a gone-to-seed version of Beauty & the Beast's Gaston. The truly guilty party is Wahlberg, who overdoes stereotypical Scarpa's everything here: his accent; his mannerisms; his strut; his smirk; his crudeness; his open-mouthed dumbfoundedness; his incessant business involving omnipresent toothpicks. Oh, those toothpicks. At one point, dumb-ass Scarpa takes a nap with one still in his mouth, though it's my unfortunate duty to report that he doesn't choke on it.
Yet for some unfathomable reason, I think we're meant to find Wahlberg adorable here. Certainly, he finds himself adorable. Viewers may be less convinced. Granted, the only men Scarpa either savagely beats or kills are virulent racists, friends of Klansmen, or legit Klansmen, so we're hardly shedding any tears over their harsh treatment. He's also, in his neanderthal way, a civil rights advocate, and a particular fan of Malcolm X. (The film's title is taken from a speech X made in June of '64.) But the violence inflicted is so ugly that it's impossible to find Scarpa likable, let alone endearing, and more points are docked when this purportedly devoted family man is shown sharing a dingy Mississippi motel room with a woman who is either his mistress or a hooker. Wahlberg accompanies all of this abhorrent behavior with a noxious “Ain't I a little stinker?” grin, and damned if the film doesn't seem to be prodding us into merriment, too. Among the otherwise all-black diner clientele, a server asks Scarpa how he takes his coffee. After a beat, he says “Black,” and then chuckles at his witty retort. I'm sorry: Is his requesting black coffee in a black-run establishment supposed to be a joke of some kind? Scarpa sure thinks so. Apparently, so did By All Means' marketing team, who used this bizarre moment to punctuate the film's trailer. Wahlberg laughed, and I stared in stunned silence at the inevitable horror of what I'd be getting myself into.
My face was likely producing the same look that Yahya Abdul-Mateen II gives Wahlberg in almost every scene they share, an expression that reads as both “Are you kidding me with this?!” and “Please shut up, you f---ing moron.” It's Abdul-Mateen who's actually By Any Means' star, and if I've spent an inordinate amount of wordage hiding that fact, that's because Wahlberg, Bratton, and Penn appear to be actively hiding it, too. Abdul-Mateen portrays (fictional) Special Agent Wayne Strider, a Mississippi native who, alongside his wife Allison (the excellent Nicole Beharie), recently returned to his home state after years in Chicago. Strider has been tasked with proving that a racist sheriff and fellow Klansmen burned down the house and caused the death of civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer (a real-life NAACP chapter president, here enacted by a very fine Giancarlo Esposito). This being 1966 Mississippi, though, no one's talking, particularly to a black FBI agent – and Strider's boss (an underused David Strathairn) knows that no one ever will unless they recruit Scarpa to deliver his particular, head-bashing brand of information gathering. Cue Wahlberg's arrival, and the creation of an In the Heat of the Night-style saga with Abdul-Mateen in the Poitier role and Steiger's part played by an ambulatory tub of ziti.
Beyond In the Heat of the Night and Mississippi Burning, another movie By Any Means readily suggests, obviously, is Green Book, that amusing, undeserving Best Picture winner in which the initially testy relationship between a crass Italian-American lout and a dignified black gent inevitably morphs into genuine friendship, both men Learning from One Another in the process. For better and worse, that's not what happens here. The (moderately) better is that Strider and Scarpa most assuredly don't become pals, although the FBI agent does begin to find the gangster semi-entertaining – a turnaround that Abdul-Mateen, squeezing out a tight smile or two, almost pulls off. The worse is that while Scarpa doesn't learn a thing from Strider, the latter is strong-armed by the script into both learning from and wholly accepting Scarpa at face value, as well as accepting that grotesque acts of violence, even murder, aren't necessary so much as preferable in the pursuit of justice. That's a grim suggestion that Penn's blunt, unimaginative screenplay can't make convincing, and based on the evidence, I'm not sure such measures are essential. At one point, with the captives stripped to their underwear, Scarpa beats and stabs two potential witnesses until blood is pouring. They still refuse to talk. Then he demands that one guy get on his knees and pull down the other guy's shorts. That's when, screaming and sobbing, the man agrees to squeal. Well, damn, if homophobia was that paralyzing in the Deep South, why didn't Scarpa simply start with that tactic?
For all of my complaints, By Any Means isn't badly made – which somehow makes everything worse. There's genuine excitement and tension in Bratton's slickly executed peril, particularly the sequence that climaxes with Dahmer's death, and pros such as LisaGay Hamilton, Josh Lucas, Ethan Embree, and stage veteran LaChanze (she won a Tony for playing The Color Purple's Celie years before Cynthia Erivo did) keep showing up with solid support. And even though his character seems only half-formed, Abdul-Mateen is a terrifically able and confident presence; he holds the film together as well as anyone conceivably could. Yet all this professionalism is merely in service to yet another odious revenge thriller involving heinously treated Southern blacks and the drawling rednecks who abuse them. (Do even the paid actors who agree to these roles enjoy participating?) As for preening Mark Wahlberg, perhaps Hollywood's most inept A-lister when assigned character roles, he turns something that could've topped out at offensive into something bordering on excruciating. Please skip this one, and by any … . Well, you know.
ONSLAUGHT
If you were shown Onslaught's opening credits completely out of context and asked what kind of movie you thought they'd be introducing, you'd undoubtedly guess a serious-minded, possibly historical war drama of some kind. Beginning with the sight of Barack Obama insisting that he wasn't against wars, but rather stupid wars, and continuing backward through film footage of American presidents discussing military actions in Iraq and Iran, and Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf, and Vietnam, and Korea, and World Wars II and I, this montage effectively establishes a premise: Over the past century, we've been at war all the time, and with the public endorsement of our leaders. You might imagine that a scary, sobering look at the horrific tragedies of those hundred years might lie ahead, or perhaps a feature about a newly imagined conflict – one that feels of a piece with global military action dating back to the 1910s. Would you be surprised, then, to learn that director Adam Wingard's Onslaught is actually a schlocky, imbecilic take on The Terminator that, in an additional nod to Aliens, turns Adria Arjona into a Sigourney Weaver with her very own Newt? Given those reference points, it would've been astounding if Onslaught co-star Michael Biehn wasn't in the cast.
In fairness, it seems as though Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett do want to deliver some kind of message regarding the treatment of U.S. troops blindly thrown into battle over the decades, and maybe a statement about how their actions affected the homefront, too. But let's get real: This isn't an urgent critique on the current, or future, state of our armed forces. This is a gory, goofball lark about a third-generation, mad-scientist Nazi who creates a trio of super-soldiers that gets accidentally unleashed on an unsuspecting southwestern trailer park. Let's not encourage this thing by subscribing to loftier notions. What sucks about Onslaught, however, is that it's not even fun on its own disposable, B-movie terms. It takes what feels like forever for Wingard to get his bloody ball rolling, and after the theoretically indestructible killing machines finally get to the park, they're offed – oops … Spoiler Alert, I guess – in what seems like record time for this genre. You'll rarely hear me complain about any film clocking in at an hour-and-a-half, but I think I'm entitled to bitch when it feels like a good 10 or 15 minutes of action were weirdly left on the cutting-room floor.
I also didn't expect a feature this dumb to leave me with so many unanswered questions. Why does Arjona's former Army sniper Celeste berate her ex-husband (Jacob Scipio) for springing on her an unexpected weekend visit with their daughter (Blake Kennedy) and then, in the next breath, profanely admonish him for threatening to move with the girl cross country? Why is Dan Stevens' third-generation Nazi, a gap that should make him middle-aged at best, buried beneath a wildly unconvincing old-man getup whose bald pate makes him resemble Dr. Evil's grandfather? Why are the recognized government employees – Stevens' Hans Kammler, Rebecca Hall's Hanna Kammler, Drew Starkey's Cyrus – all introduced as perverted sexual deviants? (Is that the message Wingard and Barrett want to send?) Why, when the super-soldiers are on the loose, do the trailer-park denizens lose their cell and landline services? Did the bad guys somehow cut phone wires and knock down a service tower when we weren't looking? Why are there so many shots of the trailer park's marquee? In case we forgot where we were? Why are there so many shots of the standing corpse burning atop the outdoor grill? In case we forgot he was still dead?
What I found most aggravating about Onslaught, however, was how impossible it was to pinpoint its tone. There's of course nothing wrong, and quite a bit right, with blending bloody mayhem and high emotional stakes and bursts of unanticipated comedy. The Terminator and Aliens, to say nothing of dozens of other examples, did just fine in that regard. But in Wingard's latest, the disparate elements don't ever successfully blend. From scene to scene, it just feels like now it's a brutal thriller, and now it's a poignant drama about a PTSD-ridden soldier protecting her child, and now it's a gory slapstick with a trailer-park resident being killed after calling the super-soldiers faggots and a stoned government official unable to keep his balance when his expensive shoes keep sliding on a blood-soaked floor. Nothing about Onslaught makes sense and the senselessness itself isn't a kick, and the only way I thought the movie might've redeemed itself was by going into more lunatic directions than it ever did. Toward the end, Arjona faces off against one of the gleaming-eyed assailants and removes the lower half of his right leg with a chainsaw. This hobbled the creature, no doubt. But every fiber of my being was hoping the behemoth would react by getting off the ground and speaking aloud for the first and only time: “It's just a flesh wound!”
FALL 2: DEADPOINT
Released in the late-summer of 2022, the survival thriller Fall didn't seem like the sort of thing that would inspire a sequel, let alone two. This tale of two extreme adventurers who scaled an abandoned TV tower 2,000 feet in the air and got stuck there was a not-bad entertainment and decent-enough indie hit ($21.8 million against a $3 million budget), but with half of the essentially two-woman cast dead by the finale, I couldn't fathom how a followup might be in the works. Stupid, stupid me. Because the movie apparently turned into a rather large deal upon its 2023 Netflix streaming, we now have Fall 2: Deadpoint, and will soon, also apparently, have Fall 3, blending the survivors of 1 and 2 in a new outing that will, if the series' escalating heights are any indication, be set entirely on the moon.
The climbers in Deadpool don't go nearly so high – just to the top of a 3,000-foot-tall mountain in Thailand. Child's play. Yet beyond the anticipated rock scaling, the route taken by Harriet Slater's Lax (grieving sister to the first Fall's unfortunate Shiloh), Arsema Thomas' ally Luce, and Tom Brittney's hired guide Jon necessitates traversing a rickety wooden walkway barely sustained by metal rods. Suffice it to say that while on that walkway, a rock slide decimates one half of the makeshift bridge after Jon crosses it and goes missing, and then another rock slide decimates the second half of the bridge, leaving Jax and Luce trapped nearly 3,000 feet in the air with only about 20 feet of narrow space to tread upon. Thankfully, Jax's phone is nearby … though dangling from one of those metal rods another 20 feet away. However will two young, spunky, industrious qualifiers for a Mountain Dew ad get out of this pickle?
Truth be told, I didn't recall much about director/co-writer Scott Mann's original Fall before seeing its sequel – beyond, that is, the film being rather blandly acted, boasting unnecessary soap-opera contrivances, and featuring POV shots that routinely inspired vertigo. As directed by Peter and Michael Spierig, collectively credited as the Spierig Brothers, Deadpoint is also rather blandly acted, and the script (by Mann and Jonathan Frank) features a couple of pretty contrived daytime-drama twists. Yet aside from a shot or two, this viewer with an abject fear of heights wasn't discombobulated in the least. Yes, the highs are higher. But unlike in the first Fall, which gave us first-person perspectives we hadn't experienced on-screen before, we've seen the followup's crossing-the-narrow-wooden-bridge conceit a thousand times in adventures set in faraway lands, and even more domestic locales. (There's even one of these bits in Stand by Me.) The hanging-from-a-mountain thing, meanwhile, is so familiar that I half-expected a cameo by Tom Cruise, or perhaps Ralph Fiennes' character from The Grand Budapest Hotel. Fall 2: Deadpoint isn't bad. It's just serviceable and kinda dull, and its subtitle doesn't make a lot of sense, because to the best of my recollection, at no point is the Thailand mountain referred to as having a “deadpoint.” Then again, I get why the movie wasn't named after the locale our heroines do get stuck on. Fall 2: Dragon's Elbow doesn't have the same zing.
MOTHER MARY
Because it had been several weeks since I'd seen a new Anne Hathaway movie and I was starting to get shaky from withdrawal, I thought I'd finally check out the recent HBO Max debut of Mother Mary, writer/director David Lowery's psychological drama that had a brief area run this past spring. In essence, it's a two-hander that finds Hathaway's titular pop diva awkwardly reuniting with her estranged costume designer and former bestie/lover Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), Mother Mary being on the verge of a nervous breakdown because she can't find the right costume for her new amphitheater tour. It has an original score composed by Daniel Hart and original songs by Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX. It has stadium sequences with acres of iPhone flashlights resembling fireflies. It has Hathaway, with her impossibly long legs, singing her heart out and looking beyond-gorge in a series of eye-conquering outfits. It should, in other words, be absolute catnip for acolytes of Swift, Eilish, and Gaga, even though those talents would surely have injected more humor into Lowery's film than the near-zero levity provided here. As for me, I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on.
I mean, I could to a point. Hathaway and Coel are concise yet enormously expressive actors who can certainly go big as moments require, and they're hypnotic to watch together – Coel with her lacerating honesty and unassailable bullshit detector; Hathaway with her moist-eyed guilt and kicked-puppy woundedness. And there are sequences that are almost transcendentally magical, as when Sam, who refuses to listen to Mother Mary's music, demands that the artiste dance her new song without accompaniment, and Hathaway's fiery, balletic movement and Coel's astonishment simultaneously radiate the miracle of her performance. I'd watch these two in a stage version of this material in an instant. I probably still wouldn't get it, though. Mother Mary sobbed and Sam gave her the smirky stink-eye, and despite the exquisite emoting on display, none of their confrontations felt of any significant importance.
Beyond generally adoring Hathaway and Coel (if you haven't seen the Emmy-winning British/Ghanian talent in the BBC One limited series I May Destroy You, a work she scripted that's also streaming on HBO Max, you must), I'm a huge fan of Lowery, who has about as eclectic a cinematic rèsumè as humanly possible: Ain't Them Bodies Saints leading to the Pete's Dragon remake leading to A Ghost Story leading to The Old Man & the Gun leading to The Green Knight. Even his lesser features are beautifully shot and thematically rich, and unless he's directing an un-directable icon such as Robert Redford, he's continually tremendous with actors. Yet despite its stellar performances, arresting soundscape, and unimpeachable cinematography by Andrew Droz Palermo and Rina Yang, Mother Mary crawls up its own ass early and stays there, the leads' portentous declarations and loaded silences unable to persuade us that their fraught reunion is about anything more substantive than making a dress. Because Mother Mary's core involves shared interior pain that physically manifests itself as fabric, and because the visualization of this idea struck me as silly, I was forced to be one of those boring pedants who instinctively thought, “Girl, forget this supernatural mumbo-jumbo and just wear off the rack!” Consequently, the ideal viewer for Lowery's inscrutable pop/fashionista celebration might be Jennifer Aniston's Rachel Green, who famously asked, “Do you even understand what 'off the rack' means?!”
