The Order (2003)

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

How sad is this?

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

The main problem with this film was its star -- Heath Ledger. Oh, don't get me wrong, before his death, Ledger had some solid performances under his belt, but this was not one of them. It isn't so much his acting here, which is satisfactory, but rather he is noticeably too young for the role. I suppose that's why they included the facial hair here, although he obviously wasn't much of a beard-grower, so the age thing just doesn't work at all. One of the most often said things about Ledger was that he showed great promise. For the most part, that promise was still to come, and certainly not achieved in this, his 9th credited film.The story is actually quite interesting. Is that there is another way to heaven than adherence to the practices of the Roman Catholic Church? Supposedly, a non-church Sin Eater can remove all taint of sin from a soul just before death, thus allowing ascension into heaven; but within the church, this belief is heretical. Ledger plays a disillusioned priest who is a member of a fictitious religious order which fights demons. His mentor has died in Rome, and while the church is attempting to paint it as a suicide, Ledger does not agree, particularly after he finds strange markings on the corpse. The symbols are that of a Sin Eater. The mentor had been excommunicated, but Ledger still buries him on sacred ground. Another priest of the same order, and a friend of Ledger's, arrives in Rome to help investigate the mentor's death. A female artist Ledger once exorcised, and who has escaped from a mental hospital, comes along for the ride, and at least in this iteration, she seems irrelevant or at least illogical. Peter Weller plays a sympathetic cardinal (or is he?), and gives Ledger a fancy dagger which must be plunged into the Sin Eater while reciting an Aramaic spell...which still must be found. And then, to be young and modern (after all, it's a Ledger film), they wander through a nightclub and an underground setting where the 'Black Pope' rules. Naturally, demons attack every once in a while, and to be honest, it gets kind of silly...though the special effects are quite good. Ledger meets the Sin Eater, who is a pretty interesting fellow who dates back to the time during with St. Peter's Cathedral was being built. As a result of their meeting, Ledger ends up having sex with the young woman...naturally, it's the hip Ledger's film. It turns out that the Sin Eater wants Ledger to take his place...and he won't take no for an answer. So, what to do? Kill the Sin Easter! Who wins? Ah, that is the question.In a sense, this film has a split personality...another reason it doesn't quite work. The movie was filmed in Italy, Paris, and New York, so the settings seem quite authentic and rather spectacular in many cases. Certain scenes -- such as when the Sin Eater is telling his background -- are quite spectacular. But then, since this is a Ledger film, there has to be a sex angle and pop movie-making, as well. So it kind of falls in between, and we are left a bit unsatisfied, as the ratings on IMDb show.Heath Ledger is "okay" here, but it sometimes seems as if he once attended the Mumbling School Of Acting. The better performance is by the Sin Eater -- Benno Fürmann, a German actor. Mark Addy does a nice job as the fellow priest.I wouldn't say not to watch this film, but it's barely meets the threshold of holding your serious attention.

These days, it's easy to see Heath Ledger's name on a film and assume it's going to be something special. Indeed, as a rule of thumb this formula is proved right more often than not. Sadly, though, The Sin Eater falls into the latter category – although it would be unfair to lay the blame at Ledger's feet. In fact, his turn is one of the few highlights of this movie. Another is the primary plot: a young, unconventional priest is sent by his Cardinal to the Vatican, where he is asked to look into the unexplained death of his friend and mentor. Along the way he uncovers evidence of the involvement of a "Sin Eater" – a figure from history who is said to offer an alternative route to redemption and therefore a path to Heaven which circumvents Catholic lore. It's a nice idea and it's given enough twists and turns to keep it interesting. There's a secondary story though, one of demons and exorcisms, and a tertiary one involving an unstable girl from the priest's past who forms the film's romantic interest. These appear extraneous and confusing, and require more explanation than the movie allows in its limited runtime. It's not a short film, but still it overreaches. The cast sees Ledger team up with Mark Addy and Shannyn Sossamon, and director Brian Helgeland, for the second time following their historical comedy A Knight's Tale. This plays less well than the 2001 offering. The usually capable Addy chews through some dubious dialogue with an even more dubious accent, yet still somehow salvages credibility. Sossamon's turn is somewhat superfluous, and the piece may have been better for her character's omission. Peter Weller makes a convincingly tough Cardinal, and Benno Furmann is suitably other- worldly as the supernatural antagonist. But the problems, for the most part, lay not with the cast: rather too much ground is made too soon, putting the viewer on the back foot from the off. The result is something that plays out like a sequel: it's taken for granted that we know the protagonists, when in fact we don't – and they remain strangers throughout. 2/5

In 2001, writer/director Brian Helgeland teamed up with actors Heath Ledger, Shannyn Sossamon and Brian Addy to create A Knight's Tale, a deliberately anachronistic story that reimagined the world of medieval jousting as the traditional underdog sports film. It was a decent flick and did well enough at the box office so that a couple of years later, the band got back together to make The Order. This movie is not at all decent and bombed at the box office. It inartfully mixes inappropriate solemnity, moral pretension, unfunny comedy, bad special effects and terrible plotting, then weirdly tries to pass that noxious brew off as the origin tale of a super-hero.Alex (Heath Ledger) is a young priest who is sent to Rome to investigate the apparent suicide of an excommunicated priest who belonged to the same religious order as Alex. He's joined on this mission by fat comic relief in the form of another priest (Brian Addy) and a beautiful young woman named Mara (Shannyn Sossamon), who fell in love with Alex before shooting him while he performed an exorcism on her. Oh, and she just escaped from a mental institution. Now, you'd think that going to the trouble of giving Mara that overly complicated a history would at least mean the character was going to play a significant part in this film. You'd be wrong on that, because all Sossamon gets to do is look pretty and flash some side boob action.Upon getting to Rome, Alex has to deal with some random demon children who don't appear to have anything to do with this story. After some sitting around and talking, he uncovers the truth behind the death of the excommunicated priest before the movie is half over. The rest of the film then deals with whether or not Alex will become a living, Catholicized version of the "Get Out of Jail Free" card from Monopoly.Alex meets William Eden (Benno Furman), who is a "sin eater". He can provide entry into Heaven for dying people outside the grace of the Church, which is a concept writer/director Helgeland never seems to have a firm grip on. On the one hand, the sin eater is presented as someone offering salvation to those unjustly denied absolution by Church authorities. On the other hand, William also lets genuinely evil sinners into Paradise for nothing more than money. Those two behaviors are diametrically opposed in every possible moral and ethical way, yet Helgeland never acknowledges or attempts to reconcile that.The Order wraps up with a truly stupid scheme to get Alex to become the next sin eater, which results in a murderer going to Heaven, another bad guy getting a concave chest and Alex walking toward the camera in slow motion while saying "I am the sin eater" like he was saying "I am Batman".This is one of those awful movies where it seems like everyone involved thought they were doing a different type of film. Ledger acts like he's in some sort of serious horror flick like The Exorcist. Addy apparently thought he was doing a Catholic homage to Ghostbusters. Sossamon, of all things, comes off like a character from the Winona Ryder/Angelina Jolie film Girl Interrupted. And Helgeland couldn't make up his mind about anything. At one moment, he's trying to pull off his own version of The Da Vinci Code. At another moment, he's veering close to something like Hellboy. There's even a stretch where Helgeland bizarrely seems to pay homage to the original Highlander movie. No, I'm not kidding about that.I don't know what happened to these folks between A Knight's Tale and The Order. Maybe they all got so drunk and so high after the success of the first film that they suffered brain damage and forgot how to make a good movie. All I do know is their second try stinks.

A priest of the Carolinian order is called to investigate the suspicious death of his leader. An artist who was institutionalized for attacking the investigating priest and whom he has exorcised previously is released and meets up with him. Demons inhabit the bodies of children and the order priest banishes them. A rogue priest, or sin-eater, is giving absolution to those about to die who have been excommunicated from the catholic church. The dark is rising. This movie is bathed in catholic religious occultism; it is very dark and secretive and seems more like an occult conspiracy theory movie with the church acting in the place of corrupt big government and the small investigative unit, consisting of the order priests and the artist, searching for the truth. Feels very X-files - if Mulder had been a priest and had a snails metabolism. Lots of strange dark occult figures and unexplained spiritual phenomena that doesn't seem to overly surprise anyone. Lots of personal angst in all the characters. The film does not transition smoothly, there is very little chemistry between characters, the acting is flat and the director fails to make us care about his movie.