THE ORDER (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Order, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 5, 2024

The Order comes from history, but at times, its story feels like the prologue to a potential future. At one point here, an FBI agent pages through a fictional book, being used by a white-supremacist terrorist organization as a guide for how to overthrow the government, and he comes across the final step of that plan. In an illustration, a mob has built gallows outside the United States Capitol. Since we've seen that sight within the past five years, the prologue could be reaching its conclusion.

Director Justin Kurzel's film may be a by-the-books police procedural thriller, which follows various law enforcement officials as they investigate and try to stop the eponymous group, but there are flashes of imagery, scenes, and characters that feel too relevant to modern times for a story that takes place 40 years ago. Kurzel and screenwriter Zach Baylin, adapting a non-fiction book by Gary Gerhardt and Kevin Flynn, know this, and they ensure that we don't forget the ties between the past and the present, even if too many people in this country seem content to ignore those connections or, worse, want a similar movement to go even further.

Kurzel's an Australian filmmaker, and maybe that remove from the politics of the United States gives him the benefit of a broader perspective on the particulars of this story. It is, at its core, a pretty straightforward cops-and-robbers plot, in which the robbers both steal millions of dollars at gunpoint and want to lead a violent rebellion against the government, people of minority racial and ethnic backgrounds, and any white person they see as a "traitor" to their racist philosophy.

There's no complexity to this. It is simply the story of good guys fighting bad guys, and the lines between those parties are clearly defined, presented, and divided here. We can appreciate the bluntness, if only because some people do seem to forget the obvious or think their way into rationalizing the irrational thinking of people like the villains of this story.

They are the members of an unnamed group, dubbed by the FBI as "the Order," after the organization in the white-supremacist tome that inspired them. It's led by Bob Matthews (a chilling Nicholas Hoult, who suggests little but hate and violence behind his cold eyes), who has separated from a racist "church" in the Pacific Northwest, because he believes the time for words has come to an end. Without action, his cause and that of other pathetic, resentful people like him will never be achieved.

There's always a challenge to material such as this, which must make the ideas of characters like Bob clear without giving those ideas a significant platform and letting them go unchallenged. The filmmakers here presume that the audience is smart enough to see Bob for who and what he is: a hateful man, devoted to nothing else but violence and his own ego. He has a big speech here, trying to recruit more members from the "church" to his cause. If the death and devastation he has enacted and wants to escalate in the near future aren't enough, Kurzel shoots the scene of Bob's rallying cry to frame him as a small, insignificant figure. He is one, but that has never stopped others like him from gaining power.

On the other side of the conflict is FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law), a man so devoted to his job that he has essentially lost his family, moved to Idaho to try to make things right again, and, with that possibility looking less and less likely, decided to dedicate himself to stopping the Order. He's accompanied by a small-town Sheriff's deputy named Jamie (Tye Sheridan), who has determined some things about the Order that no one else has and has an unspoken but clear personal stake in fighting against the group, and fellow FBI agent Joanne (Jurnee Smollett), who has known Terry long enough to know her advice to slow down for his own sake will go ignored.

The plot here is the usual routine of such material. The criminals repeatedly prove how far they're willing to go to achieve their goal—organizing bigger and more daring robberies, making threats against anyone who gets in their way, murdering anyone who actually or in Bob's mind does. Meanwhile, the cops track leads, question witnesses, and gather evidence to make a case against Bob and his ilk. It's effective here, not only because of the performances (Law, Sheridan, and Smollett play characters cut from the same law-enforcement cloth but with distinct motives and personalities), but also because of the case itself.

It cuts to something deeper—the dark underbelly of certain political rhetoric, the potential for the economically displaced or psychologically frail to be manipulated by someone like Bob, the limits of allowing some ideas to fester and spread without direct confrontation. Terry learns that last part, by way of a couple scenes of hunting, and in some inspired casting, Marc Maron plays a real-life radio DJ whose belief that talking can fix any division meets a horrific end.

There is more going on in the film than just a smart and observant procedural with bits of action, and if it sometimes feels a bit too close to the present for comfort, that's to the material's benefit and our shame. The Order knows the difference between the good guys and the bad guys, and as simple as that may sound, such an outlook is necessary under certain circumstances. To forget or ignore that is to the peril of good people everywhere.

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