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With: Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jurnee Smollett, Alison Oliver, Marc Maron, Victor Slezak
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Written by: Zach Baylin, based on a book by Gary Gerhardt, Kevin Flynn
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Directed by: Justin Kurzel
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MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence, and language throughout
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Running Time: 116
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Date: 12/06/2024
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White Trash
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
A solid, finely-acted police procedural, Justin Kurzel's crime story The Order behaves almost like a work of journalism, keeping hysteria and drama to a minimum, but also allowing the characters a bit of room to breathe.
FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law) relocates from the big city to a small town in the Pacific Northwest. He becomes interested in a series of robberies and bombings, and realizes that they might be the work of a white supremacist group, broken off from an Aryan Nation church, even though hate groups don't typically engage in such activities.
Working with local police officer Jamie (Tye Sheridan) and an old colleague, Joanne (Jurnee Smollett), Terry attempts to track down the group's leader, a charismatic monster called Bob (Nicholas Hoult). The deeper they dig, however, the more they realize that Bob is craftier and more wily than they could have anticipated. And he has something big planned.
Directed by Kurzel, The Order is a slow-burn, spending equal time on the painstaking investigation — with its many dead ends — and on the hate group as they rise to power. Frighteningly, the Order are shown as a well-oiled machine, and Bob as unflappable, able to pull of any crazy scheme with few repercussions. He makes robbing a Brink's armored truck look easy. (He's almost a little too perfect, to be honest.)
Meanwhile, the heroes are simmering with suppressed rage, especially Jude Law's Terry, who is waiting for his family to join him, even though they likely never will. It's a strange dynamic, but one that makes sense. The good guys are more flawed, more human, more recognizable, and they always need to try a little harder.
On the whole, however, the movie is a cautionary tale. It's set in the 1980s and based on a non-fiction book published in 1989, but it's even more scarily relevant today. The book that inspires Bob's racist empire is still used, and was — according to the closing credit scrawl — consulted in the planning of the Oklahoma City bombing and the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol Building. The Order is a reminder that unchecked hate can fester and poison not only communities, but also entire nations.
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