NZIFF: Riders of Justice

Recently widowed and grieving, army officer Markus (Mads Mikkelsen) proves vengeance is a dish best served bold in this dark — and comic — take on the revenge thriller from Oscar-winning Dane, Anders Thomas Jensen.

Denmark
In Danish with English subtitles
116 minutes
Rated M for Violence, offensive language and sexual material

"In a blackly comic revenge tale that could itself be titled Another Round, Mads Mikkelsen is at the centre of another ensemble of outsiders – but here he puts down the bottle and develops an itchy trigger finger.

A Danish army officer returned home following his wife’s death in a tragic train accident, the emotionally detached Markus (Mikkelsen) has his hands full looking after his semi-estranged daughter. That’s until a duo of statisticians turns up at his door, convincing Markus his wife’s death was no accident, but a gang hit on a soon-to-testify witness. Together, they become unorthodox vigilantes to target the men responsible.

Alongside Markus’s talent for combat, his associates each possess a very particular set of skills – probability calculation, hacking, facial recognition – forming a ragtag gang that’s as obsessed with hilarious bickering and one-upmanship as with the increasingly bloody task at hand.

Ambitious in its balance of absurdity and no-nonsense violence, Riders of Justice forges its own frequently hilarious path propelled by an unpredictable narrative and punctuated by laugh-out-loud moments and touching musings on grief and friendship. — Steve Newall

“Mikkelsen’s first movie after Oscar-winner Another Round restitches itself into another giddy and unexpectedly poignant modern fable about the search for meaning.” — David Ehrlich, Indiewire

“What in other hands – and, let’s be honest, Hollywood – might have been a straightforward revenge thriller becomes a darkly comic meditation on masculinity.” — Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post""