Riders of Justice: Revenge movie with a soul gets Mads and gets even
By Karen Gordon
Rating: A
There are filmmakers I’ll follow anywhere. Danish writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen and his frequent leading man Mads Mikkelsen are two of my favourites, especially when they work together.
They’ve collaborated on five films, including The Green Butchers, and 2016’s Men and Chicken, darkly comic movies characterized by plots that are of the, “How did he come up with that and make it work?” variety that are not only enjoyable, but often affecting.
Jensen is a master at finding that sweet spot between oddness and pathos. Mikkelsen makes you believe it’s all possible.
Their latest collaboration is the action revenge drama, Riders of Justice. Mikkelsen plays Markus, a military man whose extended deployment is brought to an abrupt halt when his wife is killed in a freak subway accident. He rushes home to grieve his wife and take care of their teenage daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heike Gadeberg) who was with her mother at the time and is physically OK but distraught.
Markus is appropriately protective of her but also stoic. Maybe too much so.
Although he seems emotionally empathetic and receptive, his interactions with everyone, including Mathilde’s sweet boyfriend Sirius (Albert Rudbeck Lindhart) show a hot-trigger temper. Is it PTSD and/or grief expressed as rage simmering not far under the surface?
And then he meets a man with a theory.
Newly unemployed statistician Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), was on the ill-fated crowded subway car, and gave up his seat to Markus’s wife just moments before the accident. He is relatively unscathed, and left to ponder how chance figured into this. If he hadn’t insisted that she sit down, she would have lived, and he would have died.
Back at home that night, watching the news, Otto sees something that gets his statistician’s brain going. One of the passengers killed in the crash was about to testify in a case against a mobster, the brutal head of a criminal gang called Riders of Justice. Before he gave up his seat, Otto had been people-watching and noted something odd about a man who exited the train just before the accident.
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Was it an accident? Or could the whole thing have been an assassination to stop the testimony? If so, that would mean the injured and the dead were collateral damage to protect a very bad guy.
To flesh out his suspicions, Otto turns to two of his colleagues, fellow statisticians, who are both emotional misfits and computer geeks of epic talent. He presents Lennard (Lars Brygmann) and Emmenthaler (Nicholas Bro) with a series of images cribbed from subway surveillance in hopes of building his case. When the police reject his ideas, Otto takes his friends to Markus to show them the evidence they’ve collected.
Thus is born an oddball platoon consisting of a trained combatant and his less-than-fit less-lethal allies on a violent disastrous collision course with a gang member.
On one level, Riders of Justice is your basic revenge action film, where the emotionally bruised hero is a trained fighter who can coolly hunt down bad guys and dispense justice, partially in the name of protecting his daughter. And the movie is well done on that level. The story snaps along at a good pace, with moments of humour to offset the grimness of the shoot-‘em-up stuff.
But there’s much more here. We are, after all, in the hands of Anders Thomas Jensen, who is one of the most clever screenwriters and storytellers working in film.
He’s an Oscar winner (for the short film, Valgaften), and wrote the Oscar-nominated After the Wedding (2006), and the Oscar-winning (best foreign language film) In A Better World (2010, both with frequent collaborator director Susanne Bier) and the underrated A Second Chance (2014). He has a knack for creating stories that start in a way that seem straightforward but then subtly twist and wind as they take us to unexpected places. He’s a master at subtext.
When it comes to his own movies, the ones he directs, Anders leans to the quirky. They are often stories about very odd characters who don’t see themselves that way, told with an absurdist sense of humour.
No matter how strange his stories are, how flawed or tragic his characters, how outside the norm the whole thing is, the movies are deep. And perhaps even more impressive, they are strangely moving. It’s absurdism by way of existentialism (or vice versa).
In Riders of Justice, Jensen plays with the idea of chance. When bad things happen, humans are wired to want an explanation to help them understand what may be incomprehensible. Every turn in the film can be traced back to a seemingly unrelated event. The “if onlys” abound, and in their way, shape the action.
Another constant in Jensen’s movies is the exploration of masculinity. His characters - some of whom are clearly oddballs or prove capable of outrageous behavior - have wounds that we can see, even if we don’t understand them initially.
But the characters don’t share this insight, and that make them really interesting. In movies like The Green Butchers, Men and Chicken, and Riders of Justice, the men face some deep essential tragedy in themselves; wounds, whether consciously understood or not, that defy the cliches about the way men should be in the world.
Always, Jensen shows us the story through a darkly comic lens but there’s also always something universal there. We can empathize.
He is ably helped by his remarkable cast, many of whom have worked together on his previous films to the point where it amounts to a loose ensemble. Mikkelsen, is the best known of course, and one of the most notable actors working today.
Beyond just his sheer charisma, he is a perfect complement for Jensen’s stories. He is equally able at handling the comedy and the gravitas, and able to frost up or melt down without a false moment.
Mikkelsen always feels like he’s holding something back and therefore can take his characters in any direction. His Markus is a modern man, disciplined and macho, used to making things happen. He’s a passenger in life’s ups and downs, trying to process grief. It’s another beautiful performance.
Mikkelsen has become an international superstar, but his castmates are equally strong. Everyone plays a character with a burden, and each one carries their weight equally. Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Lars Brygmann, Nicholas Bro, and Gustav LIndt, who comes in later as the sex trafficked Bodashka, form an alliance of the walking wounded.
With all that’s going on it falls on Andrea Heike Gadeberg, as Markus’s daughter, to be the reality check on what’s happening. It’s a solid performance as well.
You can, of course, watch Riders of Justice as an entertaining action revenge film. It works. But what puts this movie over the top is that it has a soul.
Riders of Justice. Written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen. Starring Mads Mikkelsen, Andrea Heick Gadeberg, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Lars Brygmann, Nicolas Bro, Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt, and Gustav Lindh. Available on Apple TV app/iTunes and other VOD platforms May 21.