By Any Means (2017)
★★★ — By Any Means (2017)
A kidnapping thriller with a twist you genuinely won't see coming. That's the best one-line pitch I can give for By Any Means, Bermuda's entry on my A-Z World Movie Tour, and honestly it's a better pitch than anything the film itself manages to sell you in its first half hour.
Let me be straight with you: this is a flawed film. The acting is patchy at best, and there are stretches in the middle where you're very aware that you're sitting through scenes that could have been cut without anyone noticing. My girlfriend and I were both thinking the same thing, and we said it to each other afterwards. Trim this thing down to seventy minutes and you'd have a tighter, leaner watch. At its current length it drags, and when the performances aren't quite landing, that drag becomes a real problem.
But here's the thing: the story underneath all of that is actually quite good. It centres on a low-level celebrity who gets kidnapped, which sounds like well-worn territory. You've seen this setup before. You think you know how it plays out. And then the film pulls the rug out from under you in a way that genuinely caught me off guard. I don't want to say more than that, because the reveal is really the whole point. It reframes everything you've been watching, and that slow build I was quietly getting impatient with suddenly feels a lot more purposeful in hindsight. The pacing, which I was ready to criticise, turns out to be doing actual work.
It reminded me a little of sitting through something like The 39 Steps for the first time, where the pleasure is partly in having your assumptions about the genre turned around. Obviously the craft levels are miles apart, but that feeling of "oh, so that's what this has been about" is a similar one.
The production is modest, which is no sin in itself. Bermuda isn't exactly pumping out dozens of feature films, and there's something genuinely interesting about seeing a small island nation produce a thriller with this kind of structural ambition. The limitations show, yes. But ambition on a small budget is still ambition, and I'd rather watch something reach beyond its means and stumble than watch something technically polished that has nothing interesting to say.
Me and my girlfriend were in agreement by the end: the story earns its keep, even if the delivery doesn't always. If the script had been handed to a cast firing on all cylinders, and if an editor had been let loose on the middle section, this could have been a genuinely sharp little thriller. As it stands, it's something more mixed: a film with a great idea inside it, working its way out through performances and pacing that occasionally get in the way.
Three stars. Worth your time if you're curious, particularly for that twist. Just go in knowing it's a slow burn and try not to lose patience before you get there, because the payoff is real.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2025-05-29
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
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