The poster for ‘Riders of Justice‘, the 2020 film by Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen, features a bearded and tough-looking Mads Mikkelsen with a rifle on his back and a pistol in his hand. It could very well be a poster for a Bruce Willis movie, and the first ten minutes of the movie seem to indicate that we are watching a revenge movie. Markus, the hero played by Mikkelsen is a professional soldier who, while deployed on a mission to a country in the desert, receives the news that his wife died in an apparent train accident. Returning home to bury his wife and take care of his teenage daughter, Markus is contacted by an eccentric mathematician who, at the time of the accident, had traveled in the same car with his dead wife, and who convinces him that it was not an accident and that he suspects who might be culprits. What follows is a kind of revenge movie, but a very special one and very different from the ones in which Willis would act or have acted in.
The action scenes are not lacking throughout the film, and yet ‘Riders of Justice‘ is far from a routine genre film, and is rather close to the violent and colorful, comic and absurd world of the Coen brothers. One of the reasons why this film is special is the gallery of characters that are excellently outlined, each of them strange in his own way but with well-justified motivations for the way he or she behaves. Markus (Mads Mikkelsen) is a professional military who has lived a large part of his life away from his family, has probably seen everything related to violence and his first instinct is to resort to violence to resolve conflicts of any kind. Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) carries back the loss of a daughter many years ago in an accident for which he was responsible, while his friend Lennart (Lars Brygmann) carries childhood traumas. Hacker Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro) and Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), Markus’ daughter, who share the overweight complexes, Bodashka (Gustav Lindh), a young Ukrainian trafficked as a male prostitute, and the teenager Sirius (Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt) complete an unlikely team that in the desire to help Markus in his revenge campaign ends up facing an ultra-violent gang of criminals.
The fact that the bad guys gang bear the judicial name ‘Riders of Justice‘ which is also the title of the film is, of course, an irony but also more than that. Far from assuming absolute clarity in separating evil from good, the story revolves around a few questions whose answers are not easy and are constantly changing, and these changes are even more interesting than gunshots duels. Are the chains of events deterministic, and can we calculate not only their sources but also their consequences and future events? To what extent can we rely on mathematical calculations and ‘modern’ technologies such as facial recognition? Screenwriter and director Anders Thomas Jensen‘s approach combines the sarcastic and anti-moralizing cynicism specific to some of the Danish films with the sympathy for his characters who are not blessed by luck. The result is that we can identify emotionally with the heroes of the film despite the many horrors that happen on the screen, some of which are committed by them. The film also has many moments of irresistible comedy, sometimes deriving from situations, sometimes resulting from dialogues, and my only reproach is a somewhat excessive length and a few redundancies in the second part, in which the screenwriter seemed to have finished the supply of original ideas and resorted in compensation to more routine action scenes and melodrama situations. ‘Riders of Justice‘ is a revenge film different from all the others that have been labelled as such so far, and the only thing we can hope for is that the American remake, if there will be one, will not cast Bruce Willis in the lead role.