It’s almost Christmas time in Denmark. That magical time of year when family gathers, magic happens, and, if you’re Mads Mikkelsen’s military man Markus, the body count continues to pile up. In the Danish black comedic drama Riders of Justice, when a teenage girl asks her grandfather for a blue bicycle, flap flap flap go the wings of the butterfly and one thing leads to another resulting in the “accidental” death of Markus’ wife in a tragic train accident. Returning home to care for his grieving daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), Markus’ militant ways fail to provide the emotional comfort she needs and he lashes out at the world around him, a simmering strong and silent type in desperate need of some therapeutic activity. 

When recently-laid off algorithm guru and all-around numbers nerd Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), who is also a survivor of the crash, and collaborator Lennart (Lars Brygmann) show up on Markus’ door to share their theory that the accident was actually a planned assassination of a former member of the biker gang Riders of Justice who was set to testify against them, Markus’s rage is ignited. Assigning himself the extracurricular activity of taking out the trash, Markus confuses vengeance for therapy. Thrusting himself and his skill set onto Otto, Lennart, and facial recognition expert and all around social reject Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro), Markus tries to balance the equation of retribution and discovers that settling the score isn’t as easy as it seemed in their calculus.  

Following the strange Men & Chicken, where writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen installed a pornstache and hairlip on the usually physically striking Mikkelsen, the danish director once again messes with Mikkelsen’s look, sliding the rough-and-tumble lead into a tight crew cut and salt-and-pepper beard to transformative effect. Always a chameleon, Mikkelsen is the rare actor who can slip between villainous turns that light up the screen (see Casino Royale or Hannibal) and sympathetic, deeply human characters (see The Hunt, Another Round, and Arctic), with little adjustment. 

Mikkelsen’s raw physicality has the ability to completely command a screen (see Valhalla Rising) and with Riders of Justice he swirls all of these traits (good, bad, and ugly) into Markus, a hard man of few words out to sea in a Denmark where men are comfortable talking about their feelings and their trauma and where his daughter just wants to see him “do the work”, rather than, you know, killing a bunch of biker thugs. It’s a remarkably controlled performance from one of the greatest living actors and showcases Mikkelsen’s ability to play the straight man in escalating absurdity.

Jensen mines a lot of the dark comedy in Markus’ bristling encounters with the civilian world. Shining brightest when his brutish nature brushes against the doughy trio of career mathematicians, Riders of Justice waffles between deadly serious and deadly funny. Though assassinations, murder, and grief are rarely confused for funny man material, Jensen maintains a foot in the comedic absurdity of it all,  letting the tone hue towards the gallows humor he’s well known for.  

Kaas, Bryamann, and Bro exact a Genius Bar riff on the three stooges, lending the film all its comedic bite, while also providing the emotional core of the film, the whetstone against which Markus’ anguish grinds. As Markus takes more and more lives, he finds an inkling of solace in his odd-couple friendship with his own nerd-core gang and realizes that perhaps death is not an equation one can ever balance, a ledger that will irrevocably end in the red. 

CONCLUSION: Darkly humorous, deadly serious, and led by yet another commanding turn from the great Mads Mikkelsen, ‘Riders of Justice’ is an absurd and violent saga of vengeance with a surprisingly soft emotional core.

B+

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