‘Riders of Justice’ Review: Just Give Me a Reason

In the jarring opening scene of “Riders of Justice,” one girl’s bike is stolen and turned into another kid’s Christmas present, kicking off a chain of events that results in a disastrous subway explosion. When Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), a probability expert suffering from a bad case of survivor’s guilt, pins the calamity on the leader of a criminal gang, he inadvertently triggers another round of violence.

The Danish filmmaker Anders Thomas Jensen understands that the most difficult tragedies to process are the inexplicable ones, the kind where there’s no one to blame. This idea is at the core of his gold-hearted, yet gleefully bloody deconstruction of the revenge thriller and the meat-headed masculine urges that typically underscore the genre.

With the help of his tech-wiz friends (Lars Brygmann and Nicolas Bro), Otto creates an elaborate schemata proving the intentionality of the crash. But things get drastically more physical when the band of nerds are joined by Markus (an unnervingly callous Mads Mikkelsen), an emotionally-stunted military man whose wife was killed in the accident, and whose teenage daughter, Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), barely made it out alive.

A trained killer with an abundant stash of firearms, Markus makes easy work of the slobbish thugs while his much less intimidating comrades watch nervously at a distance, quietly shifting their priorities toward sweet Mathilde, who’s led to believe her dad’s new friends are live-in therapists with eccentric methods.

In the end, Jensen opts for feel-good fantasy over hardened truths, but his dizzyingly chaotic methods amount to a dynamic, unexpectedly touching ode to the difficulties of baring your vulnerabilities to genuinely overcome them.

Riders of Justice
Not rated. In Danish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.