Movie Review

Jude Law battles white supremacy in real-life crime thriller The Order

Jude Law in The Order.

Photo courtesy of Vertical Entertainment

White supremacy has long been a stand-in for evil in movies, with the correlation easy to make given the strong ties to Nazi Germany. Whether a film puts forth white supremacists as its main characters or supporting ones, their usefulness in a story is as people who are easy to hate and that deserve to be held to some sort of justice.

While that idea holds true in the new film, The Order, the nature of the group featured is somewhat muddled. The central figure is FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law), who essentially sets up a one-man task force in the Pacific Northwest to track a group known as The Order. Husk is convinced that the group, which is an offshoot of a larger white supremacist organization, is behind a series of bank robberies to fund anti-government schemes.

Husk recruits local police officer Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan) to help follow the group, which is led by Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult). The two, joined occasionally by FBI agent Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett), do their best to keep up with The Order’s increasingly bold crimes, which morphs from “just” bank robbery to murder.

Directed by Justin Kurzel and written by Zach Baylin, the film is at its best when it delves into the personalities of its characters. Husk’s monomaniacal nature is great for his job, but not so much for his family life. Bowen has a solid bond with his wife and kids, but his greenness in law enforcement leads to some questionable decision-making. Mathews, like many cult leaders, is a charismatic person with very misguided tendencies.

The filmmakers set up the plot (which is based on a real-life story) well, but the details get a little loose as the film goes along. While The Order has a hatred of Jews, a plot against radio personality Alan Berg (Marc Maron) doesn’t make much sense in the context of the film. The geography of the group’s operations is also confusing; they’re located in Washington, but they range out as far as Colorado and California to commit their crimes.

Still, the inherent appeal of good-vs-evil keeps the plot mechanics going, and the side stories of the main characters give them a depth that makes up for other faults. The filmmakers also make sure to demonstrate how the scourge of white supremacy has never been limited to one particular era, and continues to infect American society to this day.

Law commits fully to the lead role, giving a performance with a convincing American accent that is far from the suave British parts which have dominated his filmography. Hoult proves equally believable, giving his character a nuance that somehow makes him more detestable. Sheridan adds another interesting role to a career that would be enviable for any other young actor.

While The Order doesn’t rise to the level of an awards contender, its story is still relatively compelling with antagonists that, unfortunately, never go out of style. A great cast playing characters with engaging lives keeps the film watchable even when it goes into some odd detours.

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The Order is now playing in theaters.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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