Director: Justin Kurzel Starring: Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jurnee Smollett, Alison Oliver, Marc Maron Running Time: 116 minutes
In previous films like True History of the Kelly Gang, Macbeth, and even in glimpses during his odd and unsatisfying adaptation of Assassin’s Creed, Aussie director Justin Kurzel has played power fantasies as fever dreams, macho mythmaking as a disorienting and destructive act of self-delusion. It should follow then, that in telling the story of militant neo-Nazi Bob Mathews, a leader of lost men who committed murder and violence as inspired by supremacist storybook The Turner Diaries, that Kurzel would dial up that delirium and delusion, to dive into the poison in the mind of Mathews and the men that he led, to sit in the disorder that led to The Order.
Though a tightly-told, tense thriller, what we get instead is too functionally formal, too tied to the conventions of cop thrillers, star vehicles, and one-for-you directorial efforts (Kurzel has never exactly took flight at the box office), to offer anything truly insightful and artful in examining the minds and motivations of monsters. If you want a solid and stoic action thriller, The Order might deliver, but if its hands-off, by-the-book look at the organising of violent racists is really what you’re after, isn’t the news, everywhere, all of the time, enough?
Nicholas Hoult is Idaho Nazi militia-man Mathews, bright eyes, cruel heart, bad wig. He’s organising an offshoot of existing white supremacists and separatists into ‘The Order’, who were inspired in 1983 by the methods set out in the Turner Diaries to commit a series of fund-raising robberies, the murder of Jewish radio host Alan Berg (here an earnest but underused Marc Maron) and aimed ultimately for outright race war in America.
On his case is Jude Law as a generic FBI agent, aged and alienating. Can you believe he’s so dedicated to the job he’s pushed his family away. Hold on to your horses, because he also drinks too much. Grizzled and gritty suits Law, his American accent holding all the stronger through slurring and sneers, he takes to the material with suitable macho gusto, but the detective with a nose for crime so strong it literally gives him nosebleeds, who has been hollowed out by the job and is literally named Terry Husk is far too broadly drawn for a movie trying to tie into actual history, and its very immediate relevance today. Law, Jurnee Smolett as his cynical colleague, and Tye Sheridan as the local cop who gets in too deep are all punching tickets for a True Detective season that’s been and gone. Alison Oliver gets a thankless role on the big screen, again. Never unwatchable, rarely does The Order feel like something we haven’t seen before.
Hoult is a good actor, but his character here lives and dies by how convincing he shows Mathews as a charismatic and ambitious leader; he only barely stands out from any of the film’s other racist freaks, the actor restrained in dull intensity and mired in middling screenplay speeches. The direction is workmanlike, even knowing the tragic fate of Berg, even hearing the hateful rhetoric of The Order, rarely does the film feel propulsive, dangerous, alive.
In one such scene of Hoult struggling to rise above the material, he’s chastised by a more mainstream hate preacher, told to stop drawing attention. He’s told that their cause will advance not by showy acts of violence, but quietly over time, by getting white supremacist ideas to infiltrate mainstream American media and politics. This has actually happened, and has actually worked, but by the language and logic of the film, Hoult is the more dominant power rising, the political player opposite him impotent and unambitious. It’s the ideas they share that are dangerous, the ideas that got Berg killed, that have been referenced by multiple murderers inspired by the Diaries, which live now in the White House and beyond. The Order isn’t very interested in those ideas, except as the big clue for its gritty Law men to find.
More focused on the action of a bank robbery, the anger of cops squaring off against each other, or any other number of well-played but well-played-out thriller tropes, The Order sands off any potential engagement with actual ideas, the loathsome ones of its antagonists or anything approaching a rebuttal, leaving only Sicario 3: Racist Drift behind. Tight, taut and empty, it’s too strait-laced to get the job done, needing a maverick to blow things up and truly crack the case.
(2.5 / 5)
The Order is in Irish cinemas from 27th December.