A stark look at domestic terrorism, led by standout performances from Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Aussie filmmaker Justin Kurzel’s work has ranged from adaptations of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” to the videogame “Assassin’s Creed,” both starring Irishman Michael Fassbender. The filmmaker may have finally found his metier with London-born Jude Law and “The Order,” an embarrassingly relevant adaptation of a 1989 American book about a famous case of domestic terrorism.
The film features a cast full of Brits, starting with Law as American FBI agent Terry Husk and a chilling Englishman, Nicholas Hoult, as the real-life Bob Mathews, the founder of the American white supremacist revolutionary splinter group known as The Order. Mathews and his henchmen murder a suspected informant in the opening scenes. This summons Agent Husk to Washington state, where we hear about his unseen daughters and wife. He drinks and smokes a lot (it’s the ’80s, after all). We will see the scar of open heart surgery on his chest. He’s a walking time bomb. Husk likes hunting, where we see him spare a majestic elk. He recruits a young police officer, Jamie Bowen (a very good Tye Sheridan), with a young wife and son who knows the area and the players. Everywhere Husk looks, he sees copies of the 1978 right-wing classic “The Turner Diaries.” Mathews breaks with an old white supremacist religious leader and creates his own much more violent organization. He leads members of his group in violent, armed bank and armored car robberies to fund his future race war. Mathews also has a wife (Irishwoman Alison Oliver) and a pregnant mistress (Aussie Odessa Young).
FBI Agent Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett, one of the other Americans in the cast) arrives with her team. She and Husk have some sort of history, but it remains clouded. Although the villains are white supremacists, we do not hear them use the N-word in the screenplay by Zach Baylin of the recent flop “The Crow.” Kurzel’s best film, his debut feature “The Snowtown Murders” (2011), was also a true-crime tale, in this case about serial killings in Adelaide.
The Order came to many people’s attention because of the murder of Jewish radio host Alan Berg (Marc Maron) in front of his Denver home with a machine gun in 1984. This event is dramatized in the film. In the opening scenes, three members of the Order walk in a single file. The first man shoots the second man. What’s wrong with this picture? The third man is in the line of fire.
Although Husk’s brooding and nosebleeds get monotonous, especially since we don’t know the source of either. He lives alone and drinks in the morning. But he is relentless in his crusade to bring down Mathews and his organization, beginning with capturing Berg’s killer and then tracing a gun from a robbery to a member of the group who hid his Mexican background. We learn that Husk has experience investigating the KKK and Cosa Nostra. Unlike Michael Mann’s 1995 classic “Heat,” to which “The Order” has been compared, Law and Hoult do not have a personal connection. Kurzel, nevertheless, makes even more disturbing use of scenes of the extremist indoctrination of children. Hate groups love their babies. When they aren’t bombing porn theaters, members of The Order are throwing barbecue parties. Hoult’s pageboy hairstyle doesn’t do much to make Mathews look scary.
‘The Order’
Rating: R for some strong violence and language throughout.
Cast: Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jurnee Smollett
Director: Justin Kurzel
Writer: Zach Baylin, Gary Gerhardt
Running Time: 116 minutes
Where to Watch: AMC Boston Common, AMC Causeway, Liberty Tree Mall and other suburban theaters
Grade: B+
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