By Any Means

Sneaky. That's the word I keep landing on. This thing creeps up on you, taps you on the shoulder halfway through, and goes, hey, I'm great. And it's right.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II can do more with a closed mouth than most actors do with a monologue. There are stretches where he says nothing at all and you know exactly what's happening behind his eyes. That's not a trick you can fake. That's a guy who knows what he's doing.

This one gets bigger in a dark room with the sound up.

And then there's Mark Wahlberg as Gregory Scarpa. I'll be honest, I didn't know what I was going to get here. What I got was a performance so believable that at some point I stopped watching Wahlberg play a mob hitman and just started watching a mob hitman. That's the whole job, and he does it.

The supporting cast doesn't drag on the thing for a second. Nobody's coasting, nobody's chewing scenery to get noticed. Everybody adds. Nothing subtracts. You'd be surprised how rare that is.

It's rated where it's rated for the violence and the language, and I want to be clear that none of it feels like it's there to shock you. It feels natural. It flows. This is a story about one of the ugliest chapters in American history, and the movie doesn't sand the edges off it to make you comfortable. It shouldn't. And when the bad guys get what's coming to them, it lands like it means something.

The acting and the directing are both doing real work here, which is why my one complaint bugs me as much as it does.

The focus. In a bunch of scenes the camera locks onto the people and lets big chunks of the background go soft. There's a bedroom scene where the bottom of the room is straight-up out of focus. Maybe somebody meant that. Maybe it's supposed to pull your eye. But it wasn't subtle to me, it was distracting, and once I noticed it I kept noticing it. When everything else in a movie is this locked in, the stuff that isn't stands out twice as loud.

I saw it in a theater and I'm glad I did. Some movies you can shrink down to a laptop and lose nothing. This one gets bigger in a dark room with the sound up. It hit harder for it.

I took the kids. No regrets there, but I'll say this: I'm not recommending this one to everybody. There are people I know who'd walk out of it rattled and there are people who'd get exactly what I got. You probably already know which one you are.

And I'd watch it again, which after two-plus hours of this subject matter is saying something. It stuck with me. Days later, still sitting there.

Blurry backgrounds and all, this one earned it. See it on a big screen.