Film Review: THE ORDER (2024): Jude Law is in Fine Form in an Intense Drama That is Lacking in Character Development

The Order Review

The Order (2024) Film Review, a movie directed by Justin Kurzel, written by Zach Baylin, Gary Gerhardt and Kevin Flynn and starring Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Marc Maron, Jurnee Smollett, Alison Oliver, Odessa Young, George Tchortov, Daniel Yip, Daniel Doheny, Sebastian Pigott, John Warkentin, Victor Slezak, Vanessa Holmes, Bryan J. McHale and Philip Granger.

Jude Law plays an FBI agent out to take down a white supremacist group of bank robbers known as “The Order” in filmmaker Justin Kurzel’s riveting but emotionally hollow new thriller, The Order. While Law and other cast members are very good, the movie sometimes feels like it’s just tracking criminals rather than letting us inside their world. We see the supremacist group’s operation and the people who run it, we understand how they run it but the movie never digs deep inside the characters (good or bad) beyond scratching the basic surface. Is it enjoyable to watch? Well, it’s interesting and, to me, that makes it likely to grab people’s attention, but a bit more development of its characters could have gone a long way to making this a more noteworthy effort.

Set in the Pacific Northwest in the mid-1980’s, the film opens with a bank robbery. We’ve seen this scene in countless movies and it’s nerve-wracking to watch here as the teller is forced to call her manager and get the money to the group of men demanding it. An alarm soon goes off and this intensifies the action. We are introduced to the leader of the group of robbers, Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult) who is a guy that seems personable on the outside but has an ugly outlook on things and a despicable nature. Funding himself and his followers’ way of life through bank robberies, Bob quickly becomes easy to hate although more insight into why people initially followed him would have been helpful here.

We also meet a Jewish disc jockey named Alan Berg (a well-cast Marc Maron) who speaks his mind regarding the issue of the white supremacists. About halfway through, he is taken out of the picture in an ugly way but the death of Alan Berg helped bring the FBI closer to catching the terrorists who the film centers around.

Law’s seasoned FBI agent, Terry Husk, is the heroic character we’ve seen in countless movies before as well but Law tries to give the character a fresh spin by not becoming overly sympathetic. We know a bit about his family and the movie doesn’t feel the need to go overboard by shedding too many further insights into his personal dilemmas. Husk is joined on his quest to stop the bad guys by a tough-as-nails FBI agent named Joanne Carney (a very good Jurnee Smollett) and Jamie Bowen (the always reliable Tye Sheridan), a local police officer whose fate we can see coming from a mile away.

An armored truck robbery in the light of day is the centerpiece of the movie and is well-orchestrated. This is not a scene out of The Fast and the Furious movies, but rather a more authentic look at how robberies occur and the movie doesn’t spare the emotions of the drivers, tellers and workers as the robberies take place in this picture. The direction is usually efficient in that respect.

A recent review I read of The Order focused a lot on the visual elements within certain frames of the movie. Although the film is probably efficiently crafted to perfection from an aesthetic point-of-view, it still needed to make some aspects regarding Law’s character more accessible to the audience. Law is a fine screen presence but the movie unevenly distributes itself between his story and the story of the supremacist group and comes up just a tad short.

In terms of the lead performance, Law nevertheless gets the job done. There are cliched moments where he goes off and does his own thing against the wishes of his colleagues. Still, Law’s scenes with Sheridan are on-point and the action never dulls. Hoult plays Bob Mathews with a ferocious energy that is unsettling to watch. Alison Oliver plays his wife to perfection. Playing the “other woman” in Mathews’ life, Zillah, Odessa Young is also solid here.

The film has a closing shot with Law’s FBI character, Husk, aiming a gun towards a deer. I won’t tell you how the movie ends but this image is a finely rendered juxtaposition to the events that occurred for the majority of the film.

While The Order is a film that has its moments of true tension, its emotional hollowness gets the best of it at times. There is a picture that could be made from this material that gets inside its heroes and villains more and lets the viewer love and hate them more than this particular movie allows us to. This isn’t trying to be that type of film though. It’s shooting more for accuracy than anything else. At face value, The Order says a lot about what’s going on in parts of the country (then and now) and makes an unsettling point during the concluding notes that will sit with viewers for quite some time.

Rating: 6.5/10

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