SOMEONE IS GOING TO PAY.
I have no idea why I waited so long to catch Riders of Justice, even though I know just how good writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen can be. I remember watching his directing debut Flickering Lights in 2000 and recognizing the fact that Danish cinema doesn’t have to be all about Dogme 95, which was the dominating trend at the time. Perhaps there was something about that title, Riders of Justice, that seemed uninteresting to me, in both Danish and English.
But I should have remembered what film historian David Bordwell once wrote about Jensen: ”As there was the Lubitsch touch and the Wilder touch, we can now speak of the Jensen touch – a twinge of pathos acknowledged quietly, relying on our sympathy for the characters’ bizarre frailties.” This is one of Jensen’s very best.
A subway train accident
One thing leads to another, in this story that begins with the theft of a blue bicycle, a crime that happened because a girl in Estonia wished for one. Because of the theft, a woman and her teenage daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg) find themselves on a subway train in Denmark when a horrible accident happens and the woman is killed along with several other passengers. Otto Hoffmann (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) was also on that train and offered her his seat; had she refused it, he would’ve been killed instead.
Otto becomes obsessed with the tragedy and finds reason, together with two hacker friends, Lennart and Emmenthaler (Lars Brygmann, Nicolas Bro), to believe that it wasn’t an accident but a terror attack staged by a biker gang, Riders of Justice. They take the evidence to Mathilde’s father, Markus (Mads Mikkelsen), who’s just returned from serving in Afghanistan. Together, they intend to exact revenge on the gang…
Going through a crisis
On paper, this may sound like a simple tale of revenge, but as in other stories by Jensen things are not quite that simple. The idea for it came out of a crisis that the director was going through, combined with watching friends suffering from depression, trying to find meaning in their lives. The way Jensen saw it, we all need to make connections that bring meaning, regardless of what they look like. Some people find it in family, others in friends, or work or some hobby. If you can’t make that connection, you’re lost. What Jensen wanted to do was to tell a story about people who randomly come together, embark on a joint mission that they find meaningful and strike up a lasting connection. All of these characters are looking for that, but the one who’s really lost is the Afghanistan veteran who’s very organized and cool, a born leader… but also a man who has no idea how to handle the loss of his wife, or how to talk to a daughter who seems like a stranger to him.
There are also surprises along the way that have us pondering our trust in technology and how reliable we are as witnesses.
There’s tension in the way the war between the biker gang and our anti-heroes escalates, but there are also surprises along the way that have us pondering our trust in technology and how reliable we are as witnesses, as well as the meaning of justice and moral values.
The new family that takes shape near the end, just in time for Christmas, consisting of Markus, Mathilde, Otto, the hackers and a young Ukrainian man (Gustav Lindh) who was held as a sex slave by one of the bikers, is rowdy and far from politically correct… but utterly lovable. A wonderful cast is the icing on the cake in this funny, unpredictable and moving yarn.
Riders of Justice 2020-Denmark. 116 min. Color. Widescreen. Written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen. Cast: Mads Mikkelsen (Markus Hansen), Nikolaj Lie Kaas (Otto Hoffmann), Andrea Heick Gadeberg (Mathilde Hansen), Lars Brygmann, Nicolas Bro, Gustav Lindh.
Trivia: Original title: Retfaerdighedens ryttere.
Last word: “There are two certainties in almost every film and that is that someone will die and that the cast can be cast as mentally ill. This is because as soon as you tune up people a little, as you do when you do drama, they will have some sort of diagnosis. I did put diagnosis on the characters [of Riders of Justice] because I could see where we were going. But I just as much wanted to portray some characters that had been left outside of society. People we forget. I know I churned up the volume here but these people do exist in real life.” (Jensen, Filmhounds)
