Justin Kurzel directs a workmanlike true-crime thriller about a real-life American white supremacist movement called the Order, which, in the 1980s, murdered Jewish radio journalist Alan Berg and pulled off bank robberies to fund a planned national insurrection. Its leader, Bob Mathews, sought a creepy martyrdom involving an Alamo-style standoff with federal agents at the group’s remote farmhouse in Washington state. Screenwriter Zach Baylin (Oscar-nominated for King Richard) adapts the book about the case, The Silent Brotherhood, by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt; Nicholas Hoult plays the baby-faced Mathews, with Jude Law and Tye Sheridan as the (fictional-composite) officers battling to take him down.
Kurzel contrives a solid, vehement film, with Law and Hoult proving to be interestingly cast; there are well-turned action sequences and on-the-nose dramatic beats about white-power fanatics pursuing their gruesome dream while the sweaty, unhappy good guys obsess about the job and neglect their families. But this isn’t Kurzel’s best work; it feels like something for streaming TV rather than the big screen, and is pretty two-dimensional and straightforward compared with Nitram or True History of the Kelly Gang. I wondered how Michael Mann might have played the shootouts, and how Jeremy Saulnier (who has a producer credit here) might have got more subversively inside the neo-Nazis’ granite skulls.
