♥♥♥♥♥
+ Best Action Comedy of the Year + Best Revenge Movie of the Year
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| Four armed men and a teenage girl are standing in a barn on the smile-inducing poster for Anders Thomas Jensen's Riders of Justice |
Marcus returns from active soldier's duty far away, when his wife's life ends in a mysterious train accident. He struggles to meet their teenager daughter eye to eye, when a couple of strange men turn up to tell him that the accident was no accident.
Riders of Justice is written and directed by great Danish filmmaker Anders Thomas Jensen (Flickering Lights/Blinkende Lygter (2001)) with Nikolaj Arcel (Klatretøsen (2002)) contributing story elements.
We are back in classic Jensen turf with a male-dominated story with deformity, pent-up anger, violence and the randomness of existence on the menu. Riders of Justice is a hilarious comedy; it also has a couple of genuinely moving scenes, impressive in their far-out action-comedy context, featuring the mesmerizing talent of Mads Mikkelsen (The Hunt /Jagten (2012)) as the beleaguered Marcus and Nikolaj Lie Kaas (Kandidaten (2008)) as his new friend Otto, who has gone through a similar ordeal in losing his wife. There is a framing story on the film about a bicycle purchase in Estonia, which is also very neat and finally also moving, helped along by the power of music. (In this case Nicolas Bro (Dræberne fra Nibe (2017)) on a French horn (!), which sounds beautiful!!)
The film is punchy and doesn't duck neither action nor dramatically related scenes and dialog. The world is a dark and ruthless place, but it packs both good and bad. The plot may be said to have more than its fair share of incredible coincidences; but on the same time the conclusion of it cleverly implies that even incredible coincidences do not point to correlations or meanings, necessarily. SPOILER Randomness is the guiding principle often in life, and in this case Marcus and his team kill countless (terrible) criminals based on a faulty deduction of facts.
Personally I still relish Jensen's preceding film most in his body of work, the outrageously weird and funny Men & Chicken/Mænd og Høns (2015), but Riders of Justice is strictly speaking just as good, especially due to the rich gallery of characters that are invoked: Bro as the obese face recognition expert and guns enthusiast; Gustav Lindh (All Inclusive (2017)) as a kind and wise Ukranian trafficking victim who comes under the team's wings; and Lars Brygmann (King's Game/Kongekabale (2004)), who arguably takes the cake as an abuse victim hacker with extraordinary abilities and issues. Andrea Heick Gadeberg (Daniel/Ser Du Månen Daniel (2019)) carries her weight effortlessly as Marcus' strong daughter.
Related posts:
Anders Thomas Jensen: 2020 in films - according to Film Excess
Men & Chicken/Mænd & Høns (2015) - Jensen scores with hilarious cinema bizarro original
The Salvation (2014) - Classic western yarn meets Danish dynamite (co-writer)
Love Is All You Need/Den Skaldede Frisør (2012) - Bier strikes gold with Italy-set romcom (co-writer)
In a Better World/Hævnen (2010) - Bier's Big Moral Drama lives on its actors' performances (co-writer)
Sprængfarlig Bombe (2006) - The two Jensens' satire is unrefined but hilarious (writer)
Murk/Mørke (2005) or, Shutter Jutland (co-writer)
The Green Butchers/De Grønne Slagtere (2003) - Great performances in Jensen's hilarious morbid comedy
Open Hearts/Elsker Dig for Evigt (2002) - Bier's excruciating Dogme chamber drama (writer)
Grev Axel (2001) - Frödin and Gråbøl pull laughter from 18th century-set crazy-comedy (writer)
The King Is Alive (2000) - Levring's trying desert theatrics (co-writer)
Watch a short clip of Brygmann as Lennart from the film here
Cost: 39 mil. DKK, approximately 6.24 mil. $
Box office: 2.4 mil. $ and counting
[Riders of Justice was released 19 November (Denmark) and runs 116 minutes. Shooting took place in Funen, Denmark. The film sold 125k tickets in its first weekend in Denmark, where it has topped 150k tickets after less than 10 days and is poised to exceed 750k tickets in coming weeks in the languished China Virus film landscape, possibly becoming Jensen's top-grossing film to date. Due to the pandemic the film does not have releases scheduled in foreign markets yet. Jensen does not have his next project announced yet. Mikkelsen returns in Chaos Walking (2021); Kaas does not have his next gig announced yet. 619 IMDb users have given Riders of Justice a 8.4/10 average rating.]
What do you think of Riders of Justice?
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