Since his 2011 debut feature Snowtown, Justin Kurzel’s films have displayed a laser-like focus on rough, sometimes savage men and the environments that foster their violent behaviors. Serial killers, outlaws, one of Shakespeare’s most brutal protagonists, and even a video-game assassin are all specters of a harsh worldview where the weak suffer and an uncaring universe summons forth unspeakable acts of rape, torture, and mass murder. It makes a certain sense, then, that Kurzel would be interested in good old-fashioned American white supremacists and the country that ennobles (even encourages) such hate. What’s less certain is why The Order is ultimately such a paint-by-numbers affair, a cops-and-robbers potboiler with a few tentative gestures toward contemporary relevance. It’s hardly a bad film, just kind of an unreservedly bland one.
Jude Law at least makes quite an impression as the stocky, mustachioed FBI agent Terry Husk. He’s an old-timer with a broken marriage and estranged children who’s been ostracized to middle-of-nowhere Idaho, where his hard-earned sixth sense starts noticing connections between a series of daring bank robberies. He does a little digging, and the local cops’ reluctance to offer any assistance suggests to him that he’s onto something. With some help from a sympathetic local, a sort of “one good cop” type played by Tye Sheridan, Husk begins tracking the movements of a local neo-Nazi White Supremacist group. Led by Bob Mathews (a very good Nicholas Hoult, turning in his second legitimately great performance of 2024 after Juror #2), this domestic terrorist organization has been holding up banks and armored cars to fund their full-fledged war against the U.S. government.
Kurzel, working with longtime collaborator Adam Arkapaw as cinematographer, has crafted a slow, methodical docu-drama that looks great but hits a few too many familiar beats. Husk is a cop-on-the-edge cliche, despite Law’s best efforts, and Sheridan’s eager partner routine ends exactly how you think it will (Dirty Harry sequels were already poking fun at this particular trope 40 years ago). There are a couple of solid action beats, including a thrilling sequence where Mathews and his crew take down an armored car transport while it’s still in motion, but the majority of the beats here are too straightforward — this is a bunch of borrowed mood and tropes from decades of crime movies, even if the antagonists are more politically loaded than something like Mann’s Heat.
Curiously, it’s the inner workings of Mathews’ organization that most fascinate, certainly more so than the standard-issue cop sequences. Hoult is shockingly charismatic as the racist demagogue, channeling some of the creepy charm and fervor of early Ryan Gosling in the underrated The Believer. Mathews worships at the altar of The Turner Diaries, that infamous text that preaches race war and doubles as an insurrectionist how-to manual; he butts heads with Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler (Victor Slezak), a more “respectable” racist who preaches patience. The film’s best scene involves this pair having a tense meeting where their conflicting methods are laid out bare: Matthews demands escalation, even if it attracts unwanted attention from law enforcement, while Butler has his eye on placing like-minded fellow travelers in the House and Senate as elected officials. It doesn’t take a genius to connect this rhetoric to our current political situation, and the film doesn’t miss a chance to beat viewers over the head with its own contemporary relevance. Less successful are attempts to position Matthews and Husk as elemental adversaries, an unstoppable force versus an unmovable object kind of deal. They have one face-to-face meeting, clearly modeled after the aforementioned Heat, but there’s no iconographic weight behind it. Ditto the fiery finale, which brings to mind the ending of Kurzel’s own True History of the Kelly Gang, but absent any of that film’s wild expressionism or phantasmagoric violence. The Order is a well-meaning, staid little film, currently being largely overrated thanks to a few stabs at contemporaneous political volatility. We’re all mad that Trump won, but that doesn’t make The Order any less dull or derivative.
DIRECTOR: Justin Kurzel; CAST: Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jurnee Smollett; DISTRIBUTOR: Vertical; IN THEATERS: December 6; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 56 min.
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