Mads Mikkelsen rang out the worst year on record playing a dad in the latest from one of his standby directors, Thomas Vinterberg (“Another Round“), then followed up with another dad role in the latest from Doug Liman (“Chaos Walking“). Now, he’s making up for that production playing his third father in a row, directed by one of his other standby directors, Anders Thomas Jensen, and all’s right with the cosmos. “Riders of Justice” comes to us six years after Jensen’s last movie, “Men & Chicken,” which incidentally also stars Mikkelsen in what’s unimpeachably the most bizarre role of the great Dane’s career; here, he’s playing a character that’s likely familiar to audiences when contextualized with his body of work.
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“Riders of Justice” riffs on the “old man action hero” niche, recently dominated by Liam Neeson in a handful of synonymous titles including “The Commuter,” “Cold Pursuit,” and “Non-Stop,” movies spun out from the success of the “Taken” franchise. But Jensen is neither Jaume Collet-Serra nor Hans Petter Molan, and instead, the filmmaker has a fondness for discarded social outsiders. Like “Men & Chicken,” “Riders of Justice” concerns folks casually dismissed or misunderstood by apathetic authority figures. Mikkelsen plays Markus, a soldier serving in Afghanistan, called home to Copenhagen when his wife dies in a train accident. But the accident appears not to be an accident at all; statistician Otto (ferociously bearded Jensen regular Nikolaj Lie Kaas), prays at the altars of coincidence and data, and he believes the train was blown up by a gang of white supremacists. He tells Markus. They tenuously join forces. Blood spills. So it goes.
The film studies Markus’ absentee guilt and Otto’s survivor’s guilt. Otto gave up his seat for Markus’ wife on that ill-fated train; trading places meant he lived while she perished, leaving Markus a widower and his daughter, Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), sans Mom. Markus, meanwhile, has the emotional vulnerability of a mollusk. When he opens up, he tends to communicate violent rage. The impulse is to categorize “Riders of Justice” strictly as a revenge film, but frankly, it’s a war film about what fighting abroad does to a man before circumstances return him home. Markus is unequipped for both his wife’s murder and for civilian life, which explains how eagerly he accepts Otto’s premise and begins hunting down gang members with military-grade assault weapons in hand.
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Jensen has a bitter sense of humor: The movie takes its title from the gang’s name, which itself is a cruel joke. Whose justice? Hate groups like to frame their animus as a form of justice unto itself; Markus, Otto, and his buddies Lennart (Lars Brygmann) and Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro, yet another Jensen alum) initially view their mission as righteous, too, but balk at seeing Markus in his element. He’s ruthless, efficient, a true fighter outclassing his enemies with almost comical ease. Otto and the boys have never seen his type before. They don’t know what they’re getting into. Lennart both wind up on the receiving end of Markus’ fists when they test his patience with pleas to reason. The guy has none, or maybe he does and his spree is his way of avoiding confronting Mathilde to reconcile their grief.
To say that “Riders of Justice” is less interested in gunfire than in male psychology is to do the movie wrong: Jensen doesn’t frontload his narrative with shootouts and fight sequences, but the ones he does orchestrate strike a chord. They’re cold, not inert or dull but pulled off with upfront calculated precision, told through Markus’ lens until the lens shifts to Otto, and the emotion changes. Mikkelsen and Kaas work well at opposite ends of the spectrum, too. Where Mikkelsen is willfully closed off save for stray twitches at the corners of his eyes, Kaas fully expresses a range of sentiments alien to Markus. Jensen requires the same labor from the rest of his cast, particularly Gadeberg, who in her third role acts with a maturity to equal Mikkelsen’s years of expertise. Everyone here is a known quantity, including Jensen, so Gadeberg becomes “Riders of Justice’s” biggest discovery.
In fact, she’s the film’s heart, and Kaas its ventricles. They both lend “Riders of Justice” depth of feeling, buttressed by Bro and Brygmann, but Gadeber bleeds while Kaas juices up Jensen’s philosophical questions. Chance is a major factor in his narrative, being the element responsible for the movie’s commencing tragedy as well as a motif in each of its sub-arcs: Every character here has lived their own worst day, so the exercise of vengeance functions as group therapy. Otto, Lennart, and Emmenthaler move into the barn on Markus’ property posing as live-in psychiatrists, a ploy to throw Mathilde off the deathly scent wafting from her dad, and for a time it works on multiple levels. The guys track the gang; Markus kills people; Mathilde heals, though Markus resists. Jensen argues the obvious, that people must rely on others for support in their darkest times, but he argues it with grace to match his plot’s ambition.
“Riders of Justice” ties together gun fights seamlessly with melancholy and masculinity, putting them on similar footing without one gobbling up the others. The effect is complimentary. Remove one theme and the others crumble. Jensen quietly, and nearly constantly, adjusts his filmmaking to suit varying tones, softening for moments where the subject is human suffering and then hardening around muscular elements, typically involving the intractable Markus. Sometimes those shifts take place in the same scene. Whether they happen concurrently or independently, Jensen executes them with the same deft sense of how each quality informs the others. His is a self-assured revenge picture.
It helps that Jensen centers “Riders of Justice” on the assurance of a terrific Mikkelsen performance, even if Mikkelsen isn’t the only one doing the heavy lifting. The film is a savage and deeply sad entry in the actor’s personal Dad-verse. But like Markus, he isn’t alone. He has Jensen and the rest of his superb castmates riding with him. [A]
“Riders of Justice” arrives in select theaters on May 14.