Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult to star in ‘superbly acted’ police drama about American neo-Nazis

Jude Law plays an FBI agent hot on the trail of Nicholas Hoult’s criminal in another “intense” film about Macbeth and Nitram director Justin Kurzel’s killers.

You know what you’re getting with Justin Kurzel. Except for one Shakespeare adaptation (Macbeth) and one video game adaptation (Assassin’s Creed), the Australian director has dedicated his career to making intense films about real-life killers, including True History of the Kelly Gang and Nitram. The latest of these is The Order, which dramatizes the adventures of a group of white supremacists in the Pacific Northwest in 1983 and 1984. As a caption at the end of the film informs us, these adventures have since been copied by many people, including those who United States Capitol Building broken into in 2021.

The leader of the group is Bob Mathews, played by Nicholas Hoult. He is tired of listening to his racist minister (Victor Slezak) preach about how the US will one day belong only to whites, so he decides to take action. He will engineer a series of armed robberies to fund the training and equipping of his buddies, and he will continue to murder, eventually carrying out a major domestic terrorist attack.

Jude Law plays the FBI agent on Mathews’ trail, Terry Husk—and a Husk he is. Separated from his wife and daughters, he’s a gruff, hardened veteran who drinks and smokes and pops pills that give him nosebleeds. That said, he’s a cop-movie cliché, but Law’s fiery glare and cursing make him fun to be around anyway. After building a reputation but ruining his health taking on mobsters in New York, Husk has moved to a quaint town in rural Idaho, ostensibly to take it easy and enjoy the mountain air. But he immediately spots all the Aryan Nation pamphlets in the area and goes to investigate, with the help of a young local cop named Jamie (Tye Sheridan).

There are definite echoes of True History of the Kelly Gang , though compared with that wildly psychedelic fever dream of a film, The Order is a bleak, steadily paced, conventional drama. It’s superbly acted by a charismatic cast, the locations and period are beautifully evoked, and, best of all, the violent robberies and shootings are staged with an unnerving ferocity reminiscent of Michael Mann’s Heat . But it’s not quite as gripping as the events deserve. We see Husk brooding outdoors, hanging out in bars with an FBI colleague (Juree Smollett), and visiting Jamie’s house, and we see Mathews hanging out with friends and family, but while all these scenes work well individually, they don’t coalesce to form a propulsive thriller plot. Zach Baylin’s screenplay, based on a book by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, has little sense of progression—little sense of clues being found, dots being connected, and a case being built—and the story drags on without getting deeper, faster, or more exciting. Since the viewer knows exactly what Mathews is up to from the start, it’s vaguely irritating that Husk and his team are so slow to figure it out. They come around to the idea that the robberies and bombings might have something to do with the men who split from a neo-Nazi church, but they certainly take their time.

Mathews seems a lot better at his job than his opponents. While FBI agents tend to bungle their operations, and Husk himself is a recklessly impulsive wreck, the tall, handsome, and polite Mathews gets to deliver polished speeches about his beliefs, and plan and execute his crimes with expert efficiency. It may be an accurate portrayal, but it borders on a positive one. I can’t help but worry that people who share Mathews’ twisted views will appreciate The Order more than Kurzel would like.