erik lundegaard

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Wednesday January 22, 2025

Movie Review: The Order (2024)

WARNING: SPOILERS

Early on, I went “Oh, this is the Marc Maron movie!” It isn’t, but I first heard about it via Marc on his podcast—two years ago maybe?—when he talked about playing Alan Berg, the Jewish DJ gunned down by neo-Nazis in Colorado in 1984. I vaguely remembered the historical incident, hoped the movie would be good, and promptly forgot about it … until “The Order” started showing up on top 10 lists. But what really made me want to watch it was when someone said Jude Law channels 1970s-era Gene Hackman. God yeah, sign me up for that.

And ... it’s not bad. It’s just not “The French Connection.” It’s a bit disconnected. Pieces don’t quite fit together.

It probably didn’t help that we watched it on the eve of Trump’s second inauguration.

Cohen Act
A playwright friend once told me he likes to begin plays with characters coming from offstage and basically saying, “Whew, glad that’s over.” This movie kind of does that. 

Agent Terry Husk (Law) has spent several decades battling the Ku Klux Klan and the Mafia, and it’s estranged him from his wife and daughter, and so when he shows up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to reopen its long-dormant field office, he’s looking for some quiet final years with weekend hunting in the mountains before retirement. Instead, the first bar he goes into, he sees a WHITE POWER flyer. The local sheriff doesn’t seem too concerned about it—doesn’t want to poke the bear, he says with a chuckle—and we don’t know if he’s affable, incompetent, or maybe a closet supremacist himself. It’s a deputy, Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan), who speaks up, telling Husk not only where Richard Butler’s Aryan Nation compound is (Hayden Lake, 15-20 minutes ride), but that they’re printing more than flyers. They’re printing money.

Meanwhile, we see various crimes committed. The movie opens with a couple of good ol' boys out hunting but they’re really murdering one of their own—someone who talks too much. Then we see the murderers team up with Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult) to rob a bank—rather terrifyingly—in Spokane, Wash. Powerful scene. Mathews gives a bag of cash to his wife, another to his mistress. Later, the mistress gets pregnant. Stay classy, Coeur d’Alene.

It takes a while for Husk to figure out what he’s up against. Indeed, on a hunting trip, he’s confronted by a stranger, who turns out to be Mathews, and Mathews knows who he is. But at this point, Husk is clueless on Mathews.

Who is Mathews? He’s the leader of an Aryan Nation splinter group called “The Order.” Apparently they’re following the precepts of a 1978 novel called “The Turner Diaries,” set in a dystopian future in which it’s illegal for white people to defend themselves against non-white criminals. Yeah, that. Everything is run by Jews, and the “Cohen Act” has taken away everyone's guns, so a militia goes underground to fight back. That’s from my own research. I didn’t get a sense of the weirdness of the novel—or even that it was a novel—from the movie.

Much of the movie is a little disconnected. The Alan Berg killing is over there in Colorado. Why did it happen? Who was listening to Berg? It’s not central to anything. You could remove it and the movie would be the same. At one point, Mathews brings some weapons expert into the fold, and I thought that was going to lead to something, but we hardly see him anymore.

Back in 1991, I remember seeing the documentary “Blood in the Face” about Pac-Northwest white supremacists, and being completely creeped out. It was like moving a boulder and seeing these weird bugs crawling beneath. I don't get enough of that sense here. Director Justin Kurzel, and writer Zach Baylin, working from a non-fiction book, “The Silent Brotherhood: The Chilling Inside Story of America's Violent, Anti-Government Militia Movement,” don't make it chilling enough. Maybe what was shocking to me then isn’t now. Back then, I thought we were past all that.

Elk hunting
The ending doesn’t work, either. Can no one do endings in prestige movies anymore?

After the death of Deputy Bowen, Husk and others track “The Order,” now just a handful of guys, to a safe house on Whidbey Island, Wash. Two try to escape, are caught, but Mathews refuses to surrender. So the FBI sets fire to the place. I don’t get why Husk went in to get him. Doesn’t work—both ways—and the last we see Mathews he’s in a gas mask getting into a bathtub with fire all around him. Can you survive a fire that way? You can’t. Then we cut to Husk hunting again, and coming across the elk he nearly killed mid-movie but for Mathews’ interruption. He takes aim. The camera closes in. That’s it.

OK?

Law is fine but maybe he was the wrong guy to channel 1970s Hackman. I don’t get enough weight from him. Hackman always let you know he was there. I do think Hoult does an amazing job. I never thought of him as charismatic but he is here—and as a fucking neo-Nazi.

Could you do the movie without the focus on the FBI? The movie opens with internecine strife—white supremacists killing one of their own—and the big divide in the film is between them: Mathews wants to go guerilla, Richard Butler wants to stay within the law. Mathews wins here, in that he splinters off, in that the movie is about him, but Butler turns out to be the prescient one. “In 10 years,” he tells Mathews, “we’ll have members in the Congress and the Senate.” He undersold. 

Posted at 07:49 AM on Wednesday January 22, 2025 in category Movie Reviews - 2024