‘The Order’ Review: Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult in an Explosive Crime Drama About the White-Supremacist Cult of the 1980s
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There’s a scene in “The Order,” a riveting and explosive docudrama about the dawn of the modern American white-supremacist movement in the 1980s, that creeps you out in a very eye-opening way. Two leaders of the movement are meeting on an isolated country road in Idaho. One of them, Richard Butler (Victor Slezak), is the white nationalist who founded the Aryan Nations, the neo-Nazi cult that has its compound nearby. He’s a racist extremist, but he has the demeanor of a courtly preacher, and he’s consciously political about the growth of his movement.
The other man, Bob Matthews (Nicholas Hoult), is a former follower of Butler’s who has split off from him, all because he thinks the Aryan Nations movement isn’t extreme enough. Matthews wants an armed uprising now, and the insurrectionary band of ruffians he leads, called the Order (he named them after the white-supremacist revolutionaries in “The Turner Diaries”), are basically a small scruffy band of terrorists. They bomb porn theaters and synagogues, they put on black ski masks and tote MAC-10 submachine guns to rob banks and Brink’s trucks. They want the money for themselves, but they’re also funding an “army” to rise up against the United States government. (One Brink’s heist nets them $3.6 million.) In an early scene, we see them kill one of their own in cold blood.
Content retrieved from: https://variety.com/2024/film/reviews/the-order-review-jude-law-nicholas-hoult-venice-film-festival-1236125318/.
