The Order (2024)

A deadly white supremacist insurgency stays one step ahead of law enforcement

Jude Law, Jurnee Smollett and Tye Sheridan are officers pitted against a violent hate group

The Order (2024)

In theaters

We’ve all heard about “underground” groups fueled by resentment and deeply at odds with established governments. The Proud Boys is one highly publicized organization we’ve seen go outside normal political channels, arm themselves and sometimes take violent anti-government action.

When did such extremist groups first take root? The Order, based on true events, is set in 1984, when hate-filled groups blossomed in the Pacific Northwest and proudly styled themselves as neo-Nazis, fervent antisemites and virulent racists.

With provocatively worded pamphlets left in neon-lit bars and pool halls, they persuaded white working-class men, often with their wives and children in tow, to attend rabble-rousing meetings. Listeners were recruited to bestir their countrymen with good news long hidden from them: America is a “White Nation”.

What’s fascinating about this sharply detailed movie is how frankly it shows law enforcement’s ignorance, even naivete, when discovering and investigating alienated groups.

The taut script smartly fuses today and yesterday, so you walk out wondering not just what nests of hatred were underestimated back then, but what hateful restiveness might lurk just below the radar today.

FBI Agent Terry Husk (Jude Law) arrives in the remote town of Coeur D’Alene, Idaho to investigate a rash of bank robberies and planted explosive devices. The town’s ambitious young deputy sheriff Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan) points him to the nearby Aryan Nation as the likely perpetrators.

Within that disciplined stronghold, Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult, in another striking 2024 performance after Juror #2) rises in the middle of a gathering and with slowly mounting fervor tells the group the time for talk is over, action is called for.

Their country, their race, need reclaiming. When he finishes, a raging chorus of “White Power!” rings from the walls.

It’s a battle cry. Husk and his colleagues are pitted against the violent provocateur. Mathews even follows Husk, daring the lawman to come after him. We soon see why he’s so smug. Operational cunning and skill seem almost entirely on the rabid racists’ side. They gleefully pull off bank robberies with increasingly larger hauls.

Mathews and his followers have been thoroughly indoctrinated by William Luther Pierce’s 1978 novel The Turner Diaries, that infamous bible of race war and step-by-step planning of insurrectionist violence.

In 1984 the FBI was just becoming aware of the incendiary book’s growing impact. Husk has never seen it. When he gets hold of a copy and studies it, he understands that Mathews may look rural and small time, but his aims are national and revolutionary

Pierce’s book gives Mathews’ growing organization its name, The Order. When we see a page with a drawing showing figures hung by nooses before a capitol dome building, images of January 6, 2021 vault to mind.

Just to show they mean business, The Order murders Alan Berg (Marc Maron), a Jewish talk radio host who dares to ask on air if we can’t all just get along.

Zach Baylin’s script, adapted from Gary Gerhardt and Kevin Flynn’s book The Silent Brotherhood, ramps up suspense by showing law enforcement outsmarted by cold-blooded, hate-filled zealots.

FBI Agent Carney (Jurnee Smollett, in a sizzling performance) is furiously impatient with Husk’s inability to focus. Catch the bank robbers and you’ll find out their plans for the money, she fumes, but you can’t even guess that until you’ve brought the bastards in.

But as we see in some harrowingly shot bank heists, Husk and crew remain a step behind the robbers. The Order’s coffers are growing, and their dreams of conquest, Husk figures, must be getting grander, too.

He’s right. Husk discovers that a Brink’s truck robbery, with a potential haul of $4 million, is next on The Order’s to-do list. “That funds an army,” he balefully informs his crew, and if they can prevent it, they might be able to bring down the hate group before its poisonous ideology gains converts across the nation.

Cinematographer Adam Arkapaw and editor Nick Fenton not only keep the action flowing but give it a hard edge of uncertainty.

The tactical advantage – with near collisions, outright crashes, and scary swerves across narrow roads – keeps shifting from the outlaws to the officers trying to bring them in. The visual seesaw is riveting. Right doesn’t look like it’s bound to win.

Director Justin Kurzel shoots action with thrilling precision. He also gets gritty, fascinating performances from his two leads.

I’ve never seen Law play a sad, slightly over the hill American before. With a rugged physicality and frightened, bewildered eyes, he makes it clear that this seasoned officer is wondering if he still has what it takes.

Nicholas Hoult is scary and ruthless as the fanatical white supremacist Bob Mathews

Hoult as Mathews not only baits Husk, but he also frightens him. And since Husk acknowledges that some vicious criminals have eluded him in the past, he wonders if the icy brutality of The Order may kill his will to fight before he can bring the murderous outlaws in.

Hoult dives deep into Mathews’ willful hatred. This brutal man-boy lives for killing anyone who won’t bow down to white supremacy. Funding that sick dogma has become his life’s mission, and Hoult deadens his eyes so completely that we can’t see even a hint of humanity in Mathews.

The drama turns on his unstoppable will to power pitted against a lawman trying to restore a sense of honor to his spotted career. The action-packed script also tries to convey a larger concern, a palpable urgency for today’s audiences.

The hate-filled rhetoric we see here as flowering evil of four decades ago has only been amplified in the years since. As we watch, our era’s hateful outgrowths simmer onscreen alongside the action.

Comparisons are unavoidable. These creators deserve credit for sending us away satisfied by their skillful filmmaking but uneasy about where roiling U.S. politics could be headed.

The movie is a fast and furious warning. Sooner than we may suspect, domestic warfare could loom in America’s future.