I can’t escape Nicholas Hoult this season. He’s currently starring in Juror #2 and he has a prominent role in the upcoming Nosferatu, but his best performance is this week in The Order. He portrays white supremacist leader Bob Mathews, and manages to emphasize the gentle charisma in this real-life man of hate. This brawny Englishman still has the boyish features of the overweight kid from About a Boy, and he plays the man as someone who engages his law-enforcement stalkers in friendly conversations about hunting practices. When one of his followers (Matias Lucas) gets arrested, his features soften as he bends down in front of the man and assures him that he won’t be angry if he gave up information to the police, and you can see how it might break someone. His performance is the most dangerous and engaging thing about this thriller that works best as pulp.
Based on Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s book The Silent Brotherhood, the film picks up in late 1983, when FBI Agent Terry Husk (Jude Law) becomes the sole staffer at the bureau’s office in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. He’s hoping for some peace and quiet amid the town’s mountainous forests, and while Coeur d’Alene delivers on the scenery, not so much on the peace and quiet. A local sheriff’s deputy (Tye Sheridan) alerts him to a bank robbery and counterfeiting operation that he believes the white supremacists to be responsible for, since he himself grew up alongside Bob and some of his followers. He convinces Terry that the group is up to something big, proof of which comes when Jewish radio shock jock Alan Berg (played by a perfectly cast Marc Maron) is murdered outside his Denver home.
British director Justin Kurzel previously did the Michael Fassbender version of Macbeth, and here he delivers proficiency but not much more. The shootout between the feds and the white power guys at a roadside motel is crisp and clear, particularly when it transitions into a footchase with Bob fleeing beside the neighboring houses. Some leavening humor (though not enough of it) comes through Berg’s sarcastic gibes at his anti-Semitic radio callers; when told that Jews consume the blood of Christians, he asks, “Is it a drink or is it more like a condiment? Is it like a gravy that you pour on your food?”
Even so, the movie fails to make its FBI protagonist — who finds that he can’t shoot an elk by the river but has no problems firing a shotgun at fleeing bank robbers — into something interesting. The movie’s supposed to hinge on the burned-out Terry rediscovering his sense of purpose in this lonely place, but for all the shots of despair and torment on Law’s face, it doesn’t ping. Kurzel has said that the movie was inspired by the January 6 attempted coup, and the movie doesn’t connect its Reagan-era story to our current times. We’re left with the action sequences and the villain, who stands up to his racist pastor (Victor Slezak) and peels off a good portion of his congregation by declaring in his soft-spoken way that it’s time to stop talking and start killing people of color. That’s what we take away from this generic exercise.
The Order
Starring Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult. Directed by Justin Kurzel. Written by Zach Baylin, based on Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s book. Rated R.
