A revenge film with dark and light rare in the genre. At the Gateway film center and on demand.
Riders of Justice
It’s unlikely a revenge film as odd as Anders Thomas Jensen’s Riders of Justice you will ever see again. It is in the Liam-Neeson, vengeful old-man “Taken” tradition with a father, Markus (Mads Mikkelsen), consoling his daughter, Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadesberg) over the death of his wife, at the same time seeking revenge for the train explosion that may have been planned.
What’s odd is his cohorts espouse a data-driven theory that claims to be able to predict events, thereby identifying the perpetrators based on the data. Writer/director Jensen layers in enough comic bungling with these three eccentric buddies for the revenge thriller to qualify for a Danish Three Stooges spinoff. With their information, Markus goes after the baddies.
Never has this genre been so light and so dark at the same time. Markus, under a heavy beard, doesn’t crack a smile (missing therefore the haunting Mads visage), and the automatic weapons take a considerable toll, while the buddies also dabble in the possibility that chance trumps data. The discussion is worthy of a more sophisticated film yet cogent enough here to make the aud think about a theme of chance.
Looked at in every sequence, chance is present from the train explosion to flawed data. Although Markus, as a soldier in the Afghanistan conflict, shows superior marksmanship, the clash between data and chance takes over for the thinking audience. Although Markus is accomplished in warfare, like Othello, he bungles his role in the civilian world as the two cultures are wholly different.
In any case, Riders of Justice (named after the biker gang which is the object of Markus’s wrath) is a unique revenge film, light-hearted and philosophical while maintaining the formula’s stringent demands for satisfactory violence. It has it all.
Riders of Justice
Director: Anders Thomas Jensen (Men & Chicken)
Screenplay: Jensen
Cast: Mads Mikkelsen (Another Round)
Run Time: 1h 56 m
Rating: NR
Action comedy drama
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JohnDeSando62@gmail.com
