"The Order" review

The Order (2003)

Directed by Brian Helgeland
Writing credits Brian Helgeland

Heath Ledger.... Alex Bernier
Shannyn Sossamon.... Mara Sinclair
Benno Fürmann.... William Eden
Mark Addy.... Thomas Garrett
Peter Weller.... Driscoll

Someone must have read an article on Sin Eating and thought, "Hey, this would make a cool movie." Little did they know that the act of one man eating a piece of demon filled bread off of another man's chest holds little entertainment value.

Celibacy is a complete mystery to Hollywood. They cannot fathom why any man would want to give up sex when there are so many beautiful, beautiful women. Celibacy is almost blasphemous to Hollywood. It goes against everything they believe in. Therefore any priest in a movie must be conflicted\confused\distraught over his lack of female companionship. When I saw the princess from "A Knight's Tale" show up, I knew this priest wasn't going to last long on the Celibacy bandwagon.

So "The Order" is another in a long line of hokey, Catholic Church bashing flicks pretending to be a horror thriller. Unfortunately, I saw little horror and almost no thrills. About midway through this movie I had to stop and ask myself: What the heck is this about? Is the priest investigating his mentor's death? Or does he want to jump the hot mental patient? And who are these guys with the hoods on their heads? The filmmakers must have shared my confusion because there were a lot of supernatural scenes that felt like they were added simply to give the rest of the flick a horror boost.

The real point of "The Order" is to give the audience an overview on how to be a Sin Eater. See, you eat a piece of bread off of a sinner's chest. Then you sprinkle a little salt on it for demonic flavor and chow down on his sins. This lets the sinner get into heaven if the Catholic Church won't let him. It's a Sin Eating loophole. The filmmakers should have stopped and asked themselves, "Is that it? Have we got anything else but delicious sin eating?" The answer is no but they went ahead and made a movie anyway. Unless you are dying to see Sin Eating, I would avoid this one. The filmmakers were very confused about what kind of movie they wanted to make. You will be too.

SCORE: 1 out of 4 priests making a move on a hot woman