You can smell the whiskey and cigarette smoke coming off Jude Law in the new crime film The Order, and especially coming off his ample moustache, as he plays an FBI agent in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s. It’s the kind of role the impossibly handsome actor might be moving toward these days, as he realizes he’s aging and can’t just be impossibly handsome anymore, not that he ever really did just that. But it would be a welcome development in his career, because he's good at playing intelligent men who have been worn down by the world, or who have been worn down by their own actions.
His FBI agent, Terry Husk, is investigating a series of bank robberies and counterfeiting in the region, and while this is very much a crime movie, it’s also a fictionalized version of real events. Because the group he’s investigating for the crimes, a group called The Order, was a real-life white supremacist militant organization, led by a man named Bob Mathews, played here by Nicholas Hoult. And both actors give excellent, grounded performances that clearly express the stakes involved as The Order attacks banks and armored cars and Husk grinds away trying to nail them down.
The Australian director Justin Kurzel handles the material in a way that makes it tense and engaging, as gritty and dirty as it needs to be, as he’s clearly shooting for something in the vein of 1970s and ‘80s Sidney Lumet films. And he mostly succeeds, and occasionally more than that—one heist in the movie is expertly executed as a piece of filmmaking and the entire film feels like it’s of its time.
The movie doesn’t do a lot to draw explicit parallels to contemporary society, but it doesn’t need to—it’s impossible to ignore the way Mathews and the people around him laid the groundwork to expand their noxious ideas into the mainstream, and it almost seems quaint the way he and his group are unequivocally very bad people on the fringe in this film, as opposed to wherever we are now.
The Order is in theaters.
