RIDERS OF JUSTICE (2020) is the genre-bending story of Markus (Mads Mikkelsen), a badass soldier who returns to his home in Denmark after his wife dies in a train accident. His daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), who survived the accident that took her mother’s life, needs her dad to help her through this difficult time, but he has no idea how to process what happened and is failing miserably. Enter Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), a data analyst and another survivor of the train crash. Otto tells Markus that his mathematical analysis indicates that the “accident” was actually the staged assassination of a person on the train by a group of criminals who go by the name “Riders of Justice,” and that his wife was an innocent casualty of that attack. Otto also brings along his eccentric, intelligent and emotionally troubled friends Lennart (Lars Brygmann) and Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro) to help convince Markus of their findings. Markus accepts their premise, mainly because he wants someone to blame and take vengeance upon. Soon, the badass and the unlikely trio of nerds set out to kick ass, compute probabilities, hack computers, and get in touch with their innermost feelings. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride, with both blood and tears flowing like raging rivers!

I must admit that prior to sitting down with a group of friends and watching RIDERS OF JUSTICE this weekend, I had never heard of the film. It came out during the COVID lockdown periods of 2020 and 2021 and somehow flew completely under my radar. I’m so glad my friend Stewart chose the film for us to watch because it’s filled with awesome action sequences, absurdist comedy, and real human emotions. I also give it bonus points for being a Christmas movie, as it begins and ends with musical renditions of “The Little Drummer Boy,” even featuring Mads Mikkelsen wearing an ugly Christmas sweater!

I’ll start my discussion of the film with Mads Mikkelsen, an actor I’ve always appreciated, as the emotionally repressed and extremely lethal soldier, Markus. Usually a film like this would star someone like Jason Statham or Liam Neeson and focus solely on his quest for vengeance and not detour too much from those goals. This movie leaves us with no doubt of Markus’ killing abilities, but it also forces him to deal with his daughter’s feelings, as well as her sensitive boyfriend’s attempts to help him heal. Men who try to push Markus into revealing his feelings usually end up with a black eye or broken nose. But to his credit, he usually does feel bad about it afterwards. Next we have Otto, the nerd whose math calculations convince Markus that the riders of justice need to die. Otto is a sweet guy who truly wants to help Markus and Mathilde, but we find out over the course of the film that beneath his pleasant personality is a life fueled by guilt and shame. And then there’s Otto’s nerdy friends Lennart and Emmenthaler. I won’t go into all of the details of their lives, but these guys are also revealed to be thoughtful, kind, angry, funny, and extremely damaged depending on the time and the circumstances. On a funny side note, Emmenthaler’s unexpected ability to assemble a weapon is second to none. RIDERS OF JUSTICE pulls off the genuinely surprising feat of creating a “family” out of this mismatched group, and we see how they come to help each other and depend on each other. This makes the stakes so much higher when they inevitably must battle the evil riders of justice. The movie is funny, dramatic, and badass in equal measures and somehow it all works! 

RIDERS OF JUSTICE was written and directed by a Danish filmmaker named Anders Thomas Jensen. I’m going to be emotionally vulnerable here and admit that I was completely unaware of Jensen, and that he and Mikkelson have an ongoing director / star, filmmaking collaboration that extends back to 2000 and currently includes six movies, with their latest, THE LAST VIKING (AKA BACK TO REALITY), set to be released in the fall of 2025. This collaboration also includes the actors Nicolaj Lie Kaas, Nicolas Bro and, with increasing frequency, Lars Brygmann. Based on my appreciation of RIDERS OF JUSTICE, I will be going back in time and watching some of their previous films to see how they stack up, and I’ll be looking forward with great anticipation to the release of their most recent work later this year. One of the great joys of cinema is the discovery of something new and special. I feel like this may have just happened for me again with a late night viewing of RIDERS OF JUSTICE!