Post by Dracula on Jan 11, 2022 1:08:08 GMT -5
Riders of Justice(12/7/2021)
Riders of Justice is a movie that kind of came out of nowhere for me and for a lot of people. Its director, Anders Thomas Jensen, is someone who seems to have been a pretty prominent screenwriter and behind the scenes force in the Danish film industry but his directorial efforts up to now have not made a huge splash outside of Denmark. Those directorial efforts have however, cultivated a working relationship with Mads Mikkelsen who is sort of at the height of his visibility right now and casting him in something of a quirky action movie right now was probably a canny move. On paper Riders of Justice is not dissimilar from a Liam Neeson revenge thriller, to the point where it wouldn’t shock me if Hollywood was currently in negotiations to remake the movie with Neeson as the star. The film is focused on a military man with a “particular set of skills” trying to hunt down a biker gang he believes killed his wife by causing a train accident to target a witness on the train set to testify against them. Pretty standard, however there are some quirks here that do set this apart from your average action movie. For one, the Mikkelsen character is working with a Lone Gunmen style collective of computer nerds who target the aforementioned biker gang using research and statistics skills and they act as this kind of consistent comic relief that sort of deflates the tough guy character that Mikkelsen is playing. There’s also a twist at about the three quarters point which kind of undercuts the revenge mission in a way that’s sort of interesting but the movie never quite goes all the way with it. So, it’s a movie that’s a bit smarter than it looks but which maybe isn’t the full subversion it needed to be to really stand out as something amazing.
***1/2 out of Five
Riders of Justice is a movie that kind of came out of nowhere for me and for a lot of people. Its director, Anders Thomas Jensen, is someone who seems to have been a pretty prominent screenwriter and behind the scenes force in the Danish film industry but his directorial efforts up to now have not made a huge splash outside of Denmark. Those directorial efforts have however, cultivated a working relationship with Mads Mikkelsen who is sort of at the height of his visibility right now and casting him in something of a quirky action movie right now was probably a canny move. On paper Riders of Justice is not dissimilar from a Liam Neeson revenge thriller, to the point where it wouldn’t shock me if Hollywood was currently in negotiations to remake the movie with Neeson as the star. The film is focused on a military man with a “particular set of skills” trying to hunt down a biker gang he believes killed his wife by causing a train accident to target a witness on the train set to testify against them. Pretty standard, however there are some quirks here that do set this apart from your average action movie. For one, the Mikkelsen character is working with a Lone Gunmen style collective of computer nerds who target the aforementioned biker gang using research and statistics skills and they act as this kind of consistent comic relief that sort of deflates the tough guy character that Mikkelsen is playing. There’s also a twist at about the three quarters point which kind of undercuts the revenge mission in a way that’s sort of interesting but the movie never quite goes all the way with it. So, it’s a movie that’s a bit smarter than it looks but which maybe isn’t the full subversion it needed to be to really stand out as something amazing.
***1/2 out of Five
