Review: Riders of Justice Is Bracingly Acted but Pulled in Too Many Narrative Directions

Riders of Justice ultimately fumbles by abandoning character portraiture for pyrotechnic cliché.

Riders of Justice
Photo: Magnolia Pictures

With Riders of Justice, writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen seems to have set himself a challenge: to wed a serious examination of emotional recovery with the sort of stock revenge scenario that typically thrives on rejecting such nuances. Due to the ferocity of the actors’ performances and Jensen’s unconventional willingness to allow scenes to breathe, this experiment brings far greater returns than anyone could reasonably expect, though the film’s dueling instincts eventually cancel themselves out.

Mads Mikkelsen’s presence in Riders of Justice certainly prepares us for the sort of badass action vehicle that’s been good to aging statesmen like Liam Neeson and Denzel Washington. As Markus, Mikkelsen sports a shaved head and a gray, bushy beard that’s attractively menacing, and the actor again proves himself to be a master of communicating tightly-coiled emotion without indulging in the sort of self-conscious mannerisms that can distance audiences from a performer. Mikkelsen allows Markus to simply be intelligent as well as profoundly volatile, which suits the character’s situation as an expert military soldier who needs to blame, and murder, someone for the bizarre train accident that killed his wife, Emma (Anne Birgitte Lind). Wallowing in grief, rage, and guilt for his obsession with his work, Markus neglects the person who needs him most, his teenage daughter, Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg). Instead of tending to Mathilde’s own confusion and misery, Markus targets a gang that could have had a role in the accident, the titular Riders of Justice.

Into this relatively straightforward genre plot, Jensen tosses various curveballs, three of which are Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), Lennart (Lars Brygmann), and Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro), a group of probability scientists who help Markus solve the mystery of Emma’s death. Geeky with broadly contrasting physical characteristics, and recruited to pose as psychologists in what proves to be a farcical turn of events, this oddball trio primes one for a comedy. And, indeed, Jensen clearly grooves on the disconnect between this trio and the lean, scary, poignantly manly Markus, though he and the actors play the characters’ neuroses deadly straight, as the film’s humanity springs from the kinship these men forge as they discover that, for all their surface differences, they share similar kinds of psychological scar tissue.

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Emmenthaler is the most vivid of the bunch, as Bro informs this obese, lonely, bitter, possibly OCD-addled misfit with a wellspring of self-loathing that’s so volcanic and intimate that it threatens to take over the film. This rage is a resonant contrast to Markus’s own estrangement, as Emmenthaler suggests the blubbery, vulnerably “uncool” person that Markus suppresses, while Markus embodies the kind of person that someone like Emmenthaler would see as a masculine ideal. Such details, and Riders of Justice abounds in them, are so convincing and moving that one can often look past the cute character arcs that Jensen eventually indulges.

Ultimately, Jensen cannot reconcile the fact that a mature story of men in crisis doesn’t coherently mesh with suspense scenes in which Markus viscerally annihilates a violent gang. Jensen also plays the action straight, and while it’s staged with a jolting sense of spontaneity, this decision proves to be a mistake. Simultaneously, then, we’re conditioned to root for Markus to communicate with people reasonably and seek professional help, while cheering him on as he kills sadistic thugs who are too generic to challenge such Pavlovian triggers.

Jensen achieves this discombobulation intentionally, and he may want the audience to feel a sense of loss as Riders of Justice abandons character portraiture for pyrotechnic cliché, suggesting what we lose when we watch routine action movies—an impression that’s intensified by a late-inning twist that allows us to enjoy the killing anyway. But such disappointment simply translates to a wish that he’d picked one narrative or the other, or had the nerve to satirize the violent thread that he seemingly holds in contempt.

Score: 
 Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Andrea Heick Gadeberg, Lars Brygmann, Nicolas Bro, Gustav Lindh, Roland Møller, Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt, Anne Birgitte Lind, Jacob Lohmann, Henrik Noël Olesen  Director: Anders Thomas Jensen  Screenwriter: Anders Thomas Jensen  Distributor: Magnet Releasing  Running Time: 118 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2020  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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