Mads Mikkelsen Commands Riders of Justice‘s Subversive Revenge Dramedy
The Danes have a long, long history of dark fairy tales. Scrub away the Disneyfication and Hans Christian Andersen will keep you up at night. That tradition continues with Riders of Justice, a fable about the importance of men getting therapy, disguised as a revenge thriller. Mads Mikkelsen’s bushy beard and the film’s Christmas setting lend the movie to an irony-laden, moral-toting mythos—and its black humor, tough action and complex emotional core work just well enough that, like reading a classic fairy tale, you’ll be along for the ride after coming to terms with a few tonal surprises.
Yes, writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen co-wrote the abysmal The Dark Tower adaptation. Try not to hold that against him: He’s also written dozens of Danish films and won a few Oscars. Riders of Justice sees him reunite once again with Mikkelsen, who has appeared in all the films Jensen has helmed. This time, the Danish demigod is playing military man Markus, a recent widower who finds out that the circumstances around his wife’s death might be more than accidental.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a longtime Mikkel-simp or a new convert looking to explore the actor’s work after seeing his Oscar-winning Another Round: Mikkelsen satisfies. He’s an angry meathead made angrier and meatier by the loss of his wife and the cold confrontation with the fact that he barely knows his remaining family member, his teen daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg). His old-school response to trauma is a swallowed bitterness, an acceptance that the world is cruel, unfeeling and unknowable. And yet, his isolation and pain are quickly interrupted by those that think the opposite.
A trio of deadpan doofuses a la The X-Files’ Lone Gunmen (all variations on crackpot tech or probability nerds) notice that hey, maybe this train crash that very specifically killed a gang member who was turning on his biker brethren might not have been coincidence. Led by Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), the man who barely escaped death by giving up his seat to Markus’ wife, these goobers—basically who Dr. Ian Malcolm would actually be—push a theory that helps emphasize the film’s elegant prologue scene: That tangible, trackable cause-and-effect ripples are more trustworthy, satisfying and ultimately true than any sort of fate or randomness.
Naturally, this leaves poor, bottled-up Markus with only one logical, self-destructive outlet: Murderous revenge. But Riders of Justice is no John Wick. Jensen films some impressive action—intimate and upsetting rather than basely satisfying—and peppers in absurd or absolutely arid humor as his team of fragile, needy, odd, obsessive men seek closure, but ironically this fable is far more grounded than anything as mythic as the American Action Hero.
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