| Worth seeing: | as a nostalgic revisiting of a real-life, early 1980s clash between the FBI and a ruthless, white supremacist crime gang |
| Director: | Justin Kurzel |
| Featuring: | Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Alison Oliver, Bradley Stryker, Bryan McHale, Carter Morrison, Daniel Doheny, Daniel Yip, David LeReaney, Geena Meszaros, George Tchortov, Jurnee Smollett, Marc Maron, Matias Lucas, Morgan Holmstrom, Philip Granger, Phillip Forest Lewitski, Sebastian Pigott, Tye Sheridan, Victor Slezak |
| Length: | 116 minutes |
| Certificate: | 15 |
| Country: | Canada, UK, US |
| Released: | 26th December 2024 |
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
In the early 1980s, FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law) moves to the Pacific Northwest to investigate a series of bank robberies that he believes could be connected to a white supremacist group.
A local police officer, Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan), agrees to help him hunt the gang responsible – an armed offshoot of a wider Aryan group that’s been seeking respectability through its church.
Under the leadership of the charismatic, young Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult), The Order moves onto bigger and bigger heists and starts killing Jews, their first victim being a radio show host (Marc Maron) who calls our their mindless, racist ideology.
At first, The Order manage to keep themselves hidden from the authorities, but one stupid mistake provides Husk with a clue that helps him close in on Mathews, leading – as with many such cults – to a violent siege at a remote house.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
With an Australian director and two British actors in the lead roles, The Order provides an outsiders’ view of a perennial problem in American society – rabid anti-semitism among white-supremacist neo-nazis.
Justin Kurzel, Nicholas Hoult and Jude Law shine a spotlight on a particular gang, active in the early 1980s – but pick almost any moment in the past sixty years and you could find a similar story to tell.
At the point that Kurzel’s narrative begins, Hoult’s charismatic Mathews already hates Jews – it’s never really explained why – although it’s perhaps not the intention of Kurzel to try to humanise his antagonist, other than with a side glance at his marital problems.
In one of Edward Norton’s prominent early roles, in American History X, he played a neo-Nazi leader who terrorised the local black community, but that film tried to explain why an otherwise respectable family man might have taken so violently and mindlessly against his neighbours. While it never sought to justify his violence, it provided dramatic nuance, but when there is no effort made to explain an inexplicable hatred for a minority group, the motivation for Mathews’ heists almost becomes irrelevant, making this not so much about an FBI agent trying to smash a neo-Nazi gang as it is about the authorities trying to catch a bunch of thieves.
And the final showdown at a remote farmhouse makes it feel more like a film about a religious cult than a political movement.
That said, concentrating on the crimes rather than the motives almost makes it more frightening – that anyone can be so relentlessly callous – and others can so thoughtlessly follow them – for no particular reason.
Similarly, there is a brief moment where you feel that you might find out a bit about Husk’s past and how that informs his drive to stop the white supremacists – but Kurzel doesn’t explore this avenue much either. Jude Law has aged nicely into the middle-aged lawman role.
As a procedural crime film, a weakness of the plot is that it relies on Mathews making one stupid mistake, rather than particularly sharp police work.
The Order has the feel of a 1990s American independent film – the kind of movie that seems to have got lost in the mix as the studios concentrate on franchise sequels and indie film-makers return to low-to-no-budget awards contenders.
With an effective sense of the period, this makes for a nostalgic take on the mid-budget crime movie; it’s a welcome return for the genre, with strong performances from the two leads, but it doesn’t really have much to say about nihilistic racism or the burning need of the authorities to tackle it.