Real life events are used to power a new crime thriller hitting cineplexes. Based on the 1989 book entitled The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, The Order places us alongside FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law) who after noticing a pattern in recent bank robberies, counterfeiting operations and armored car heists terrorizing communities across the Pacific Northwest, goes after a white supremacist group known as the Order led by Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult) that has splintered off from Richard Butler’s (Victor Slezak) Aryan Nations.
If you’re a fan of investigative thrillers in the vein of David Fincher’s work, The Order is definitely a film that will scratch your itch the genre. Law’s Terry Husk fits the grizzled veteran law enforcer archetype, even complete with the chronic ailment that slows him down while he hunts for the suspect. Hoult does a fine job as the ambitious Mathews who seeks to build his own Aryan following not just out of commitment to the cause, but also due to the aggrandizement of his own ego which he tries to conceal but is always bubbling underneath the surface. Their cat and mouse game is enough to keep you engaged through the film’s two hour runtime as you see Mathews’ plans unfold while Husk seeks to catch and stop him.
The topicality of the film’s antagonists add a bit of intrigue to The Order as the presence of white nationalists in our culture has risen steadily over the past few years. The film documents the real life escalation of their radical terrorism in a way that both serves the narrative structure of the film, but presents it in a historical documentarian way as well that makes it feel slightly more visceral. This is best encapsulated by the subplot following the assassination of Denver, Colorado Jewish radio host Alan Berg, played by Marc Maron, where we see the fiery pontificator provoke and challenge white supremacists until The Order targets him in front of his home. The well executed portrayal of the famous incident helps to make the events and people in the film feel that much more real and like something that can happen in our current world offscreen and not just in recent history.
Despite these positive aspects, The Order never truly rises above being a by-the-numbers crime thriller with familiar story beats and elements. It’s never a bad film at all, but it never elevates past being a passable, average film that feels familiar and rote into something that is greatly compelling and a must watch. As the film unfolds, the audience feels like it’s just checking the typical boxes until the runtime ends in genre fare you’ve seen many times over. This sort of familiarity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but doesn’t make for the type of film you rush out to theaters to go see.
Image: Amazon MGM Studios
