As much as it pains me to say it (it doesn’t pain me that much), I haven’t had much interest in newer movies for some time. I have my reasons, but that would just be a distraction here, so I’ll leave that part a mystery. Nevertheless, I decided in the new year to try and catch up on some of the better ones, so I reached out to some of my friends and asked for their best recommendations from the last five years or so. One of the ones that was recommended that I hadn’t heard of that sounded interesting was Riders of Justice. So we found it on tubi and fired it up.
Riders of Justice (written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen) might sound like an early ’90s action movie starring Brian Bosworth, but it’s not. The movie stars Mads Mikkelson as a special ops soldier who must return home and deal with the sudden death of his wife and his grief-stricken daughter.
One thing I appreciate about Riders of Justice is how economical the script is: within minutes, we know all we need to know about this family. Markus (Mikkelson) is a perpetually deployed soldier that hasn’t really had a hand in raising his teenage daughter, Mathilde. Soldiering comes first and Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg) and wife Emma (Anne Birgitte Lind) come second. They are used to being let down by him and have learned to be self sufficient. But when Emma dies in a train accident, Markus is forced to step up and be the dad he never was to Mathilde.
But Markus is a man who has never really learned to deal with his feelings. His strategy for coping with the sudden loss of his wife is to move on, push down the pain. But his daughter can’t just move on, and this causes tension between them.
When it seems like their relationship will break down completely, two strange men knock on his door and tell him that his wife’s death was not an accident. One of those men, a man named Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), gave up his seat on the train for Markus’s wife. Otto does statistical analysis and was working to develop some kind of predictive model before being fired from his job on the day of the accident. It seems he had observed a man behaving strangely on the train before disembarking right before the explosion that killed Markus’s wife. The guilt he feels he bears for Emma’s death and the observation of the man‘s strange behavior lead him to look further into the train accident. Otto finds that a gang member who was set to testify against the gang’s leader was on that train. There are no coincidences, according to Otto, and so he becomes convinced that the gang had the man killed by placing explosives on the train. That’s what the man he observed behaving strangely was doing, he decides.
So Otto employs the help of friend and former coworker, Lennart (a hacker played by Lars Brygmann), in digging up all they can on the strange man. Markus may not be capable of dealing with his emotions or parenting a teenage daughter, but revenge is something he can sink his teeth into. And with his background, killing is something he is not only accustomed to but good at. Otto and Lennart bring in a second hacker named Emmanthaler (played by Nicholas Bro) to help them verify the identity of the train bomber, and the quartet set to work with their plan to avenge Emma.
Markus, Otto, Lennart, and Emmanthaler make an unusual band of brothers. The A-Team these guys are not, but a team they are, and as the movie progresses, we find out that each man is privately (and sometimes not so privately) struggling with his own demons. Demons that he is mostly ill-equipped to deal with.
On the surface, Riders of Justice seems like a straight-up revenge flick, but what it really is about is men and men’s relationships with their families, with one another, and with their own emotions. It’s a story about how men are better when they have one another to lean on, how they make each other better by holding each other accountable, and learning from one another. “Iron sharpens iron” as the bible tells us.
Sure, there’s action. There’s Mads being badass Mads. But there’s also humor. And warmth. There are layered, complex characters, and a desire on the part of the filmmakers to understand them rather than simply label and scold and condemn them. Different types of masculinity are represented in each of the men, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, and none of them are dismissed or rejected as toxic or inherently bad or wrong. Riders of Justice is unique because it manages to treat the subject of masculinity without dismissing it or passing judgment on parts of it or resorting to canned, modern, and stereotypical criticisms. It’s engaging, funny, smart, heartbreaking, and it manages to do action without sacrificing important details like humanity and character and humor and all the other real human emotions that Hollywood action movies are content to skip past.
If you decide to press play on Riders of Justice, pop a bag of popcorn and settle in for some solid entertainment…but don’t forget the Kleenex.
