Movie Review: THE ORDER

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: December 6th, 2024 / 07:23 AM

THE ORDER movie poster | ©2024 Vertical Entertainment

Rating: R
Stars: Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Jurnee Smollett, Tye Sheridan, Marc Maron, Alison Oliver
Writer: Zach Baylin, based on the book THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD by Kevin Flynn & Gary Gerhardt
Director: Justin Kurzel
Distributor: Vertical Entertainment
Release Date: December 6, 2024

THE ORDER begins by informing us that it is “based on true events.” Indeed, these events have been written about at length, and dramatized several times before. This film is specifically based on the book THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt.

A splinter group of the Aryan Nations, the Order was a white supremacist gang that operated in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1980s. Headed by Robert Jay “Bob” Mathews (played here by Nicholas Hoult), the Order committed a string of bank and armored truck robberies to finance what Mathews envisioned as a war against the U.S. government, Black people, Jewish people, and pretty much anybody else he deemed insufficiently white and Christian.

The Order murdered Denver radio host Alan Berg (played here by Marc Maron), a crime dealt with in fictionalized form in the play TALK RADIO by Eric Bogosian & Tad Savinar, and in its 1988 film adaptation, co-written and directed by Oliver Stone.

While THE ORDER includes Berg’s assassination, here it is shown in the context of a wave of violent crime. While Mathews and company are depicted as being fully committed to their philosophy of hate, they also love their guns and a pretext to fire them.

The screenplay for THE ORDER by Zach Baylin, as directed by Justin Kurzel, seems to generally conform to the known facts when it comes to the criminals, using real names and histories. We get some dimension on Mathews, courtesy of both the writing and Hoult’s performance, though not a strong sense of what drives him.

However, the law enforcement characters are amalgamations, and since we spend a lot of time with them, the filmmakers might have used dramatic license to make them more distinctive. Instead, FBI Special Agent Terry Husk, played by Jude Law, conforms to any number of movie lawmen, estranged from the family he loves by work, haunted by past failures, a loner who works on his instincts. Law employs an excellent American accent – as does Hoult – but the script doesn’t give him much to make his character memorable.

Jurnee Smollett is solid as a steely fellow agent who has a history with Husk, Tye Sheridan is sweet as a helpful sheriff’s deputy, and Alison Oliver is up to the complexities of Mathews’s put-upon wife.

What THE ORDER has going for it is a strong sense of time and place, along with superb production design, courtesy of Karen Murphy. Anyone into ‘70s and ‘80s American cars is likely to be in retro vehicle heaven. While another non-mega-budget movie might work in a few vintage autos, THE ORDER has a whole Sears parking lot full of them.

Likewise, when Husk enters the FBI field office in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, not only does it look appropriately lonely, it also feels like the epitome of a small but official workspace. The Order compound has the kind of faux-homey appearance that is often manifested by a certain mindset.

THE ORDER is a decent if not extraordinary fact-based procedural that profiles a certain kind of terrorism. Forty years later, it remains painfully and tragically timely.

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