The Order Review
by Andy Keast (arthistoryguy AT aol DOT com)February 24th, 2004
"The Order" (2003): ** out of ****
Written and directed by Brian Helgeland. Starring Heath Ledger, Shannyn Sossamon, Benno Fürmann, Mark Addy and Peter Weller.
by Andy Keast
"The Order" takes a somewhat interesting premise and overcooks it in typical Hollywood fashion, leaving it in the ghettoized genre that I like to call *Thrillers of the Cloth.* Like "Stigmata," "The Ninth Gate" or "End of Days," these are movies that only pretend to be about religion, but are really about special effects, scary voices altered by synthesizers, dark corridors and perverse religious imagery. The fire and brimstone began with "The Exorcist" in 1973, a movie that was informed about religion as well as faith. Ever since
then it's emulators play more like Halloween parties than supernatural thrillers.
It's more of a story idea than a story. The film was originally titled "The Sin Eater," which explains all the titular lines. Given the target audience for the movie, there are no points for guessing why the title was changed. Apparently it's not enough to simply tell a story about a sin eater, which in the Catholic tradition would "absorb" the sins of those banished from the church. Unless it's a movie specifically about the life of Jesus, Hollywood has always seen Catholicism as a perverse, voodoo-like thing, and their interpretation of this "absorbing" of sins is to surround characters with digital effects and flashing lights while screaming and yelling. Why? I don't
know. The "sins" themselves take on the form of translucent octopi. Why? I don't know. My guess is that most audience members' knowledge of the "soul" or
"spirit" doesn't go beyond the deaths in Warner Brothers cartoons, wherein a ghostly, haloed apparition raises from Daffy Duck as he lay dead.
It begins very much like a John Carpenter film (with a title sequence that's almost identical to that in "Prince of Darkness"). The head of the
Carolingian
order dies under mysterious circumstances. Heath Ledger, a New York City priest, is informed of the death by Peter Weller, looking like Count Orlok with
a hat. Ledger goes to Rome to investigate, Scooby-Doo style, and then the tenets of the genre kick in: stoic girls with dark eye-liner, subterranean night clubs, dark ante-chambers filled with pillars and torches, et cetera. For everyone's information, Rome is not a city of human sacrifices or magical men dressed in black. There *are* crumbling churches, but none that will crumble a la CGI before your eyes. The movie has some extraneous subplots involving Shannyn Sossamon and Mark Addy, but those have nothing to do with anything except the film's requirement of a love interest and a goofy sidekick.
Benno Fürmann, as the sin eater, is given what could've been some impressive speeches, but hams it into overdrive. Weller and Addy vanish from the screenplay halfway through, and will there be a twist involving Weller, the most extraneous character of them all? I wonder…
The movie was written and directed by Brian Helgeland, who adapted "L.A. Confidential" and "Mystic River." I like his writing style. He creates harsh,
defined characters but at the same time makes them to absurd and goofy things.
I liked the scene early on where Mark Addy nonchalantly talks on a cell phone while standing in front of a demolished florist truck with a dead body rammed through the window. But then there's a scene with Ledger in a cemetery being terrorized by two evil-looking kids (complete with spooky day-for-night photography), whose faces contort with flashes of lightning. Suddenly they vanish, and enter Addy asking Ledger what just happened. "…oh, just demonspawn in the guise of children." Is it meant to be funny?
"Ghostbusters"
funny?
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