Review of Riders of Justice (2020) by Rmurray847 — 10 Aug 2023

I pretty much expected to like RIDERS OF JUSTICE because Mads Mikkelsen is pretty amazing and I also get a kind of visceral satisfaction from well made "vengeance" movies (think JOHN WICK or even COLD PURSUIT...or even Mikkelsen's REDEMPTION). There's something about a character being stripped down to just one thing: revenge as a way to push down irredeemable grief.

What I wasn't prepared for was how complex, how surprising and how funny this film would be. I'm glad I didn't know any details; the joy of discovery as I watched this film was quite remarkable. Yes, there are plenty of viscerally satisfying scenes of the one stoic man, bent on wrathful vengeance, taking justice into his own hands. That box was easily checked.

But would you expect such a film to contain, among other things: a meditation on why God would allow such things to happen (Mikkelsen's wife is killed in a commuter train accident, that might really have been a very elaborate murder of a witness against the mob), one how laying blame is a slippery & tricky effort, on the ways data and statistics can be twisted to prove our feelings are valid, on how difficult it really is to kill someone and most of all, how a measure of grace and forgiveness and redemption can come from the most unexpected places.

Mikkelsen's character, Markus, a career soldier suddenly called back from the front due to his wife's death, is the very picture of stoicism. His teen daughter Mathilde wants to grieve; she even asks to go to counseling. Markus tells her "just don't talk about it and it'll go away." And yet, when a data analyst comes to him with a compelling story about how the whole gruesome accident was really a murder (and also tells him who is responsible), Markus sees no other option than to destroy any and all who might be even tangentially responsible. And he's joined in his effort by the most interesting and hilarious group of computer nerds (for lack of a better term), each of whom has a backstory that helps bring them to Markus' side. I say "hilarious" knowing how unlikely that seems. Just go with it.

I'll stop here, because to tell more of the plot would dampen what I enjoyed most about this film...being absolutely surprised by how these characters developed, often caught off guard by plot developments and hearing laughter drawn from me in the most unlikely of circumstances. While the film follows many expected plot lines, it never does so in a way you'd expect.

This is not a movie for kids. It's bloody. Lots of bad language. And a few disturbingly frank "sexual" moments that are not at all sexy, but which reveal a lot about characters. But it IS a film for experience movie-goers who think they've seen it all. Extremely well written, expertly & briskly directed, and terrifically well-acted, RIDERS OF JUSTICE surprised me again and again. And the ending was richly satisfying, and surprised me when I realized how much I'd grown to actually care about these quirky characters.