Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult star in a ‘superbly acted’ cop drama about US neo-Nazis

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

You know where you are with Justin Kurzel. Aside from one Shakespeare adaptation (Macbeth) and one video-game adaptation (Assassin’s Creed), the Australian director has spent his career making intense films about real-life murderers, including True History of the Kelly Gang and Nitram. The latest of these is The Order, which dramatises the exploits 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 exploits have been copied by many people since then, including those who broke into the United States Capitol Building 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) preaching about how the US will one day belong solely to Caucasians, so he decides to take action. He will mastermind a series of armed robberies to fund the training and equipping of his buddies, and he will move on to assassinations, and eventually a major domestic terror attack.

Jude Law plays the FBI agent on Mathews’ trail, Terry Husk – and a husk is what he is. Separated from his wife and daughters, he’s a gruff, grizzled veteran who drinks and smokes and takes pills that give him nosebleeds. That is, he’s a cop-movie cliché, but Law’s fiery glaring and swearing make him fun to be around, anyway. Having built a reputation but wrecked his health by taking on Mafia mobsters in New York, Husk has moved to a scenic small town in rural Idaho, supposedly to take life easy and to enjoy the mountain air. But he immediately notices all of the Aryan Nation leaflets in the area, and investigates with the help of a young local policeman, Jamie (Tye Sheridan).

There are obvious echoes of True History of the Kelly Gang, although compared to that wildly psychedelic fever dream of a film, The Order is a sombre, steadily paced, conventional drama. It’s superbly acted by its charismatic cast, the locations and the period are evoked beautifully, and, best of all, the violent robberies and shoot-outs are staged with a nerve-jangling ferocity that recalls Michael Mann’s Heat. But it isn’t quite as gripping as the events deserve. We see Husk brooding in the great outdoors, sitting in bars with an FBI colleague (Jurnee Smollett), and visiting Jamie’s house, and we see Mathews hanging out with friends and family, but while all of these scenes work well individually, they don’t join together to make a propulsive thriller plot. The screenplay by Zach Baylin, adapted from a book by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, has little sense of progression – little sense that clues are being found, dots are being joined, and a case is being built – and the story plods along without becoming any deeper, faster or more exciting. Indeed, because the viewer knows exactly what Mathews is up to from the beginning, it’s vaguely annoying that Husk and his team are so slow to catch on. They come around to the idea that the heists and bombings might have something to do with the men who have splintered from a neo-Nazi church, but they definitely take their time about it.

Mathews seems to be a lot better at his job than his opponents are. While the FBI agents have a tendency to bungle their operations, and Husk himself is a recklessly impulsive mess, the tall, handsome and polite Mathews gets to make polished speeches about his beliefs, and to plan and execute his crimes with expert efficiency. Maybe it’s an accurate portrayal, but it verges on coming across as a positive one. I can’t help worrying that people who share Mathews’s warped views might appreciate The Order more than Kurzel would want them to.