The trailers have largely sold Riders of Justice as a revenge actioner, and there’s certainly revenge and bullet-riddled action as a shaggy stony Mads Mikkelsen wields weapons with precision. But that’s not what one might remember first when thinking about this film. Director/screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen has constructed a canny darkly-comic odyssey through grief, healing, and violence.
A bicycle theft set to a holiday jingle is an aptly acclimating opener to Riders of Justice’s askew tone. It’s the first domino in Jensen’s tangle of characters and events, lives suddenly intertwined by horrible tragedy. A viscerally abrupt subway disaster soon brings together the film’s disparate threads, a trio of socially-awkward programmers and tech savants arriving on the doorstep of Mads’ bullish grizzled soldier Markus and his grief-stricken daughter Mathilde. Their (somewhat extralegal) data analysis have revealed that his deceased wife was not the victim of a subway accident, but the causality of a coordinated assassination by the local Riders of Justice biker gang. Suddenly Markus’ repressed wrath has a target, while Otto, Lennart, and Emmenthaler have their tactical operator.
The interplay between Mads’ “Taken in Denmark” action dad and the screwball tech-buddy banter is a tonal marriage that pays comedy dividends. Actors Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Lars Brygmann, and Nicolas Bro guide the film through deadpan gags and acerbic dark humor, especially once they roll with Mathilde’s assumption that these new faces are grief counselors helping her father. That’s not an entirely incorrect conclusion as Jensen gradually escalates the action into a cycle of violence, Mads becoming increasingly consumed by avengement. Those revenge sequences are well-crafted action filmmaking, erupting Riders of Justice’s steady pace with bursts of strategic gunplay and frenetic ambushes. Mads with his cropped top, chiseled beard, and withering glare strikes a formidable presence familiar to anyone who’s seen his roles in The Salvation or Polar.
But that intense action and bleak humor are both means toward Riders of Justice’s humanistic ends, acting as propulsive reinforcement for a gripping drama. Jensen utilizes those action-movie tropes to explore grief, repressed trauma, slowly-cracking facades, and healing connections. A grasp for closure and answers among painful coincidence fuels all of the film’s conflicts. Mads Mikkelsen delivers another magnificent performance fresh off his Oscar-winning Another Round, wrapping personal anguish and battlefield pain in the hardened armor. There’s a raw guarded heartache to his portrayal of the widowed Markus. Andrea Heick Gadeberg acts as his guiding light, a daughter deeply concerned about his violence-first coping and cold dismissal of help. Their father-daughter relationship – one strained by tragedy and PTSD – is the film’s beating heart; Markus and Mathilde coping with their loss, each trying to help the other in incompatible ways, becomes the thread weaving the Riders of Justice’s various facets.
That thread intertwines with the other subplots to create a surprisingly emotional canvas, Markus’ revenge acting merely as the genre-film frame. Nikolaj Lie Kaas’ Otto quickly assumes position as a secondary protagonist, struggling with his own demons. Along with Brygmann’s Lennart and Bro’s Emmenthaler, the trio buzzes with manic energy and odd antics that gradually expose the emotional scars beneath. It’s telling that the action sequences often choose to focus on its characters’ empathy and struggles with violence, rather than on death-dealing thrills. As the film progresses, that empathy comes to define Riders of Justice, as each eruption of violence conversely peels back its protagonists’ armor, exposing painful truths and strengthening the group’s healing bonds.
Strip away the blazing guns and pitch-black comedy, and Anders Thomas Jensen’s thriller reveals itself to be a film about companionship and recovery. Amid the Danish wrath, the aloof personalities, the crime-thriller trappings, It’s easy to forget that opening scene with its merry jingle and holiday promise. But by the end, one might remember Riders of Justice less as an action film and more as the Christmastime therapy of an unorthodox family.
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