Riders of Justice

"The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means."
-Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven 

"Denmark is a pretty good place to live but it is by no stretch of the imagination the utopia many in politics and the media in the U.S. claim to be." That's how British author and journalist Michael Booth put it in an interview with The Washington Post a few years ago to promote his book The Almost Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavia Utopia. The gist of the book, from what I could gather in the interview, is that yes, Denmark and other Scandinavian countries do well and offer a lot that other countries could learn from, but they're not perfect. There is petty theft, for example, and there also is violence.

In fact, nine thousand Danes filed a criminal complaint with the police last year. In a country of almost six million people, that comes out to about 0.0018 percent. But it still happens. We see it in the opening moments of Riders of Justice, the Danish film directed by Anders Thomas Jensen, when an uncle wants to buy a bike for his niece. The problem is that it's red, and she wants a blue one. Perhaps she will one day get it, her uncle assures her, and then the seller places a call for the order. The order, however, is not a legitimate one. Two common thieves break off the chains of a blue bicycle, and now they have it to sell to the uncle.

This action leads to a tragic chain of events. The blue bike belonged to a teenage girl named Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), and now she can't get to school. The family car won't start, so her mother (Anne Birgitte Lind) decides to take her via train. They're already having a bad day because on top of those two inconveniences, they've learned that Mathilde's father, Marcus (Mads Mikkelsen), will continue to be deployed in Afghanistan for another three months.

Also having a bad day are Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and Lennart (Lars Brygmann), two probability scientists who are fired from their jobs when the algorithm they've come up with proves useless to the company they work for. Having packed up his things, Otto gets on the same train as Mathilde and her mother. Being the gentleman he is, he stands up and gives his seat to Mathilde's mother, but there's a terrible accident that kills eleven people, including the mother who sat down in his seat only a few moments earlier. Naturally, Mathilde is in a state of shock and falls into a depression, and Marcus returns home. Angry at what has happened, he doesn't know how to connect with his daughter and console her. He even punches her boyfriend (Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt). 

Otto likely also goes through shock and grief (especially as he realizes that it should have been him to die), but his mind knows this could not have been a mere accident. One of the victims of the crash was an informant who was to testify in the trial against the violent leader of the notorious Riders of Justice gang, Kurt (Roland Møller). With the witness now dead, Kurt will likely be acquitted. But Otto and Lennart, once the police aren't interested in helping, take a chance and confront Marcus with their slightly far-fetched theory. So consumed with anger, Marcus makes a likely candidate to join them in their ragtag quest for justice. Now, instead of just petty theft, there will be blood, and lots of it.

Riders of Justice, the fifth film Mikkelsen and Jensen have collaborated on, is a film that changes tones with remarkable ease while effortlessly blending a variety of genres—from action to drama to comedy—while keeping one's attention and investment throughout. There is emotional weight here, especially regarding the father-daughter dynamics, yet there are also lots of laughs, particularly from Brygmann and frequent-Jensen collaborator Nicolas Bro as Emmenthaler, the third part of the mad geniuses who work out together that something is amiss with the train crash and that something must be done. Yet the drama and comedy are really buoyed by the universal desire for revenge. Marcus has been pricked, he bleeds, and he desperately wants revenge.  

In addition to the perfect acting from the film's cast, much acclaim should be given to Jensen for his smart script. You may struggle to keep up with all the mathematical jargon, and it may be especially challenging if you're reading the subtitles, but it's worth the effort. Just about every other moment in this flick is unpredictable, making the whole thing seem like a smarter version of Taken. Indeed, it might be the smartest action movie you've seen in a while. 

While some of the gratuitous violence grows stale as the film reaches its denouement, most of the rest of the film is a blast, and a thought-provoking one at that. I kept thinking about consequentialism while watching it, the idea that a moral act is one that produces something good. The choices our protagonists make against the Riders of Justice may challenge this. Do the ends justify the means? What happens if mistakes are made? What happens if the ones you love get hurt along the way? These are all worthy questions, but even if they're not your cup of tea, there's still a lot of shoot-outs and laughter along the way to keep you entertained.