Mark Reviews Movies: RIDERS OF JUSTICE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 13, 2021

Writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen's Riders of Justice is an intelligent and surprisingly compassionate revenge thriller. Well, it's at least compassionate toward the people plotting vengeance. The targets of that revenge are a different story.

This isn't just a by-the-numbers tale of anger and violence, and we can tell that early on, by way of some of the characters' fascination with numbers. The leader of that particular group of misfits and outsiders is Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), a computer programmer with a head for statistics and a mind for trying to assemble life into a series of causes and effects.

He developed an algorithm for a marketing company, which could, in theory, learn and be able to predict the behavior and decisions of people, based on an assortment of specific histories and general characteristics. Otto is basically laughed out of the board room where he presents his project to a team of executives (who are skeptical when the algorithm only detects the socioeconomic patterns of car purchases by brand—a fact they all assumed was common knowledge). Despite the skepticism and his dismissal from the job, Otto has big plans for his creation, until an apparent and fatal train accident spins him into a web of possible conspiracy and seemingly righteous vengeance.

Jensen's film, then, isn't just about revenge. It's about what the concept of revenge means on deeper, more existential level. If Otto's algorithm—with its advanced and intuitive techniques powered by the lightning-fast processing power of computers—can't and won't be able to find some meaning in even the most mundane aspects of human life and activity, how can the human mind even consider processing the purpose of tragedy (or the lack of any purpose to it), the moral complexities of any given action, or the meaning of life itself?

We can't know any of these things, but we can feel that dread, that rage, and that uncertainty of knowing we cannot comprehend them. What is revenge, if not trying to manufacture simple, easy-to-understand order out of the chaos of violence and loss?

That's the question put forth to Markus (Mads Mikkelsen, in an especially potent performance of stewing rage and hidden angst), a career military man from Denmark, although such questions aren't really part of his vocabulary and mindset. He's a man of action, trained for and living it over the course of his decades in the military. At the story's start (following a prologue of apparent insignificance involving a stolen bike, which simultaneously means everything to this plot and nothing in the grand scheme of the world), Markus is once again disappointing his wife Emma (Anne Birgitte Lind) and teenage daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), staying with his unit somewhere out-of-country for an extra few months.

The wife and daughter decide to spend a day in the city. Otto is fired. All three end up on the same train together. Otto gives up his seat to Emma. Soon after, the passenger train crashes into a parked freight train, ripping apart the side where Emma is sitting—killing her and dozens more.

The official story is that it was an accident. Otto, who doesn't believe in coincidences, is convinced that it was an assassination. The member of a biker gang called the Riders of Justice was about to testify against the group in court, and the programmer is convinced that the gang's leader (played by Roland Møller), who knew the turncoat was a creature of habit, arranged for his death. Otto, along with his fellow eccentric computer nerds Lennart (Lars Brygmann) and Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro), manage to convince the grieving but emotionally constipated Markus of the theory.

All of these men want to believe that there's some meaning to the train crash—that Emma's death meant something beyond an accident, that Markus can actually do something about it, that Otto's useless guilt can be assuaged, that there is some order in the grand scheme of the universe. The plot, which has the unlikely quartet connecting the apparent dots and planning how to eliminate as many members of the biker gang as possible, is secondary to these bigger concerns about the apparent chaos in the world and these characters, as they try to force some order upon the situation and their own troubled lives.

There's usually an obvious and wholly predictable formula to thrillers with plots akin to this one, but Jensen doesn't just sidestep all of those usual story concerns. He evades them entirely, spending far more time watching these characters attempt—and repeatedly fail—to process their grief and guilt and other problems, connect and divide over their almost reflexive behavior in the face of difficulties, and discuss matters of more far-reaching significance than who's next on their list of targets. The characters' drama (The broken relationship between Markus and Mathilde is of major concern) and histories (Otto's discomfort with seeing the shattered father-daughter relationship has tragic origin) come first in Jensen's focus here.

There are, of course, moments of fairly brutal violence, but there's also unique tone that marries dark humor (All of it comes from the characters and their quirks, although Jensen gradually makes us laugh with them, not at them—or not at all) and candid melancholy. The film's plot, revolving around the gang and their comeuppance, delves into the wicked side of humanity, so it's a genuine surprise how warmly and humanely Jensen approaches and treats his central characters.

Riders of Justice presents a cold, cruel world and, more importantly, characters whose desperation to make sense of everything they've experienced always comes up short. They gradually and inevitably connect over that. Faced with such existential despair, what else, really, is there to do?

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