Order, The

The Order felt like a movie full of fits and starts… those starts being some surprisingly good action scenes, but the fits just kind of everything else. It’s a movie that is both a little slow and just as fast as it needs to be.

It’s a true story set in 1983 where an FBI agent is investigating some bank robberies… only to stumble on a white supremacist group with plans bigger than their actual skills or assets. They want to take down the government as soon as they rob more banks and hang more race traitors.

Jude Law is the FBI agent and between his ’80’s ‘stache and his American accent, I barely recognized him. He give a good, angry performance though I could have done with less (or maybe more) of his home life since what they delivered didn’t go anywhere.

He gets an assist from Tye Sheridan as a pretty boy deputy who doesn’t look at all like any of the other mustachioed, burly cops. He looks out of Hollywood Central Casting. And maybe that’s what the character he plays looked like, but he looked out of place to me.

But maybe not as out of place as Nicholas Hoult as the charismatic Neo-Nazi leader. Because, yeah, he also doesn’t fit the part. Again, he looks like a pretty boy out of Hollywood and, again, maybe that’s what the guy looked like. But in both camps – the good guys and the bad – one of these things does not look like the other. Maybe extra credit for out-of-the-box casting? Charitably said.

On the plus side, the action and heist scenes were very good. The heists – especially an armored car one – was so good I began to wonder whose side the movie was on. On the amusing side though, both the good and bad guys went to the Stormtrooper Academy of Guys Who Can’t Shoot Straight… their aim is so bad as to be comical in the film’s shootouts. And probably, just like Hoult and Sheridan, exactly what these shootouts looked like. Less Hollywood, more “holy cow, they’re shooting at me!”

I was generally ok with most of the down-time in the film. Not great, not super intriguing, and a little too long and with an “oooookay” kind of ending. But serviceable enough in between some quality acting and action.

Score: 76