A brooding, muscular FBI procedural that occasionally explodes into Point Break-y action, Aussie director Justin Kurzel’s (Snowtown) true-life thriller delves, pungently and topically, into the inner workings of white nationalism in America before deciding that squealing tyres and shootouts are a lot more fun.
It’s a shame because The Order is spearheaded by a bang-on-form Jude Law, bringing a rumpled, lived-in quality to his dogged federal agent – like Eli Wallach doing John McClane.
He’s pill-popping bureau veteran Terry Husk – a character description as much as surname here – sent for the good of his health to an Idaho backwater in 1983. ‘The only crime around here is catching trout without a licence,’ the local sheriff tells him. Which is true, if you ignore the fast-growing and heavily armed neo-Nazi cult just outside of town, which he has.
Happily, Tye Sheridan’s diligent local cop, Jamie Bowen, has been keeping an eye on a white supremacist group – The Order – that contains an old high-school friend. It’s that kind of community: you grow up to be a Nazi or a cop. There’s not much in the middle.
Nicholas Hoult, who never takes the safe option, imbues the group’s real-life leader, Bob Mathews, with a charismatic kind of malice. He’s a family man, as well as a hardcore racist, with a pregnant mistress (Odessa Young) squirrelled away from his unquestioning wife (Saltburn’s Alison Oliver). Most of all, though, he’s a criminal whose self-professed revolutionaries fund their plans for domestic terrorism through bank robberies.
A muscular FBI procedural that explodes into Point Break-y action
Adapted from Denver journalists Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s account ‘The Silent Brotherhood’, and perhaps mindful of a more current neo-Nazi resurgence, Zach Baylin’s screenplay takes its antagonists entirely at face value, missing the chance to burrow more deeply under the skin of their warped ideology.
In Spike Lee’s BlackKklansman, set a decade earlier, America’s racist underground was a shambolic place, fertile terrain for pisstaking. Here, Mathews is more like a neo-Nazi Ned Kelly. And the thrillingly-excited heists, underpinned by Jed Kurzel’s thumping score, get perilously close to lending them a sheen of action-movie glamour.
The Order shows Mathews’ group breaking away from the more controlled but no less ugly grip of the Aryan Nation, like a disease metastasising. One tensely staged face-off between Hoult’s tearaway and establishment racist Richard Butler (Victor Slezak), leader of Aryan Nation, draws the lines as a hidden sniper seems poised to enforce them. It’s an interesting dynamic that goes nowhere.
The two female characters are barely sketched at all, the extent to which they share in Mathews’ toxic beliefs never made clear. Another bolted-on subplot revolves around Denver talk show host Alan Berg (Marc Marron), the Jewish broadcaster who inspired Oliver Stone’s 1988 drama Talk Radio. But there’s a lot of swastikas in The Order and Maron’s outspoken eloquence is a much-needed counterpoint to all the fascist ideology – and later, a key element in the story.
Still, there’s plenty of armrest-gripping sequences, as Husk, Bowen and Jurnee Smollett’s FBI field officer pursue their quarry through spectacular Pacific Northwest landscapes, dowdy motels and backwoods compounds. And Law keeps showing new sides to his game. The dashing leading man has become a character actor of real substance.
The Order premiered at the Venice Film Festival.