Jude Law
“THE ORDER” My rating: B (In theaters)
114 minutes | MPAA rating: R
The torn-from-the-headlines crime drama “The Order” offers the spectacle of two Englishmen — Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult — portraying distinctively American characters with smoldering intensity.
They’re terrific.
Perhaps even more salient is the way that Aussie director Justin Kurzel’s film, though set almost 40 years in the past, resonates ominously with our current zeitgeist.
When we first encounter Law as FBI agent Terry Husk, he’s almost unrecognizable. Law has for so long been a sex symbol that seeing him slightly overweight, with a droopy mustache, puffy features and a slightly disheveled look, our brains can hardly take in the transformation. (He did much the same thing earlier this year by beefing up to play King Henry VIII in “Firebrand.”)
After a long career fighting organized crime, Terry has been assigned to reopen the bureau’s dormant Idaho office (the setting is the early 1980s). It’s a low-keyed assignment, presumably to reward him for years of high-intensity, dangerous work. His main concern is finding a house for his wife and kids (whom we never see).
Uh…no. A missing person report turns into a murder case; the victim is a white supremacist whose loose lips apparently teed off his swastika-lovin’ buddies. And before long Terry is neck deep in an investigation of a growing terrorist threat.
Nicholas Hoult
Hoult plays Bob Matthews, a charismatic/conniving hater who, frustrated that the Aryan Nation leaders are too slow to begin a race war, has created his own spin-off sect, “The Order.”
(Has any other actor in recent years played such a wide variety of roles? Hoult has been a war boy in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” a hilariously entitled Russian tsar in “The Great,” a mutant in the Marvel Universe. He’s played author J.R.R. Tolkien, and appeared in “The Favourite” for director Yorgos Lanthimos.)
Matthews has recruited a small army of similarly-inclined social outcasts and begun a campaign of bank and armored car robberies and bombings. They’re printing counterfeit money.
He also orders the assassination of Denver radio talk-show host Alan Berg (Marc Maron), who routinely ridicules the separatist/supremacist mindset.
Hoult is so good you can see why malcontents are drawn to him. But he also deftly explores the character’s growing sense of personal power and the contradictions between the Christian faith he extolls and his clearly unChristian proclivities.
Screenwriters Zach Baylin, Gary Gerhardt and Kevin Flynn stick remarkably close to the historic facts, which provide several opportunities for well-staged action sequences.
Terry is aided in his investigation by a fellow agent (Jurnee Smollett) and a local cop (Ty Sheridan) whose roots in the community prove invaluable in unravelling the mystery.
Hanging over it all is a pall of nervous anticipation that renders even the beautiful Northwestern landscapes somehow threatening and sinister. The hate speech, the waving of The Turner Diaries, the determination to punish “race traitors” — it’s all a bit too familiar for comfort.
Looking around our country today, one concludes that Bob Matthews would be pleased.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 