‘There are a centillion reasons. None of them will help you...’
I grew up on the action movie heroes of the 80s and 90s. Jean Claude Van Damme was my teacher. Sly Stallone my babysitter. Arnie my Godfather. These men taught me about honour. They taught me about respect. They taught me about getting to the chopper. And yet, their legacy was never continued. Action films became too self-referential. Too eager to send themselves up. Part of what made those action classics so compelling is that they played it straight. Aside from the occasional one-liner, these were mostly serious movies. And this is what made them so gloriously ridiculous.
In recent years, the action genre has been split down the middle. We now have comic book adaptations or violent revenge fantasies. There is no in between. Riders of Justice, whilst leaning into the revenge subgenre, is the first film that I have seen since John Wick that adequately captures the spirit of those 80s classics, if not the aesthetic. And it’s an instant classic of the genre…
When his wife is killed in a freak train accident, Markus (Mads Mikkelsen) struggles to care for both himself and his daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg) in the wake of the tragedy. The waters are muddied further by the arrival of Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and Lennart (Lars Brygmann), two statistical analysists who claim that the train crash was no accident. After recruiting Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro), an unhinged and troubled computer expert, the unlikely crew attempt to find justice in the murky criminal underworld of Denmark.
It should be first be noted that this film is all things to all people. It’s genuinely hilarious, with Emmenthaler’s outrageous proclivity for bad language a particular highlight. It’s gleefully violent without ever feeling gratuitous. It’s heartfelt, even philosophical, in all the right places. Any hint of sentimentality is earned not forced. The cast, led by Mikkelsen, are uniformly superb, sharing an electric and authentic chemistry. Director Anders Thomas Jensen, working from his own screenplay, gets the pacing and the plot beats just right. In short, this is an instant classic. Probably the most exciting film in this genre since The Raid in 2011.
Riders of Justice is a fantastic cinematic experience and one that reminded me why I fell in love with action movies in the first place, heck, why I fell in love with cinema in the first place. Glorious, life affirming stuff.