Riders of Justice (Danish: Retfærdighedens Ryttere) is a 2020 Danish action comedy thriller written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen. It stars Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Lars Brygmann and Nicolas Bro.
Markus (Mikkelsen), an experienced soldier stationed in Afghanistan, is suddenly called back home when his wife, Emma, dies in what appears to be a tragic train accident, and he must be there for his grieving daughter, Mathilde. But after a trio of eccentric data scientists contact him and show him evidence that a gang of outlaw bikers were perhaps responsible for planning the "accident", Markus embarks on a campaign of revenge.
Tropes:
- All Bikers are Hells Angels: The Riders of Justice are an outlaw biker gang and criminal organization.
- Antagonist Title: The villains are called the Riders of Justice, though the title could also apply to our heroes.
- Bathos: The film frequently juxtaposes the grim revenge story with absurd comedic elements.
- Black Comedy: The film has a surprising amount of very dark humor, providing lots of bathos.
- Book Ends: The film begins with Mathilde's bike being stolen to be sold as a Christmas gift for a priest's niece in Tallinn. The last shot of the film, taking place during Christmas, cuts back to the girl receiving the bike and taking it for a ride.
- Boom, Headshot!: Markus tends to shoot people in the head with brutal efficiency
- Central Theme: Causality.
- Cycle of Revenge: Markus takes revenge on the outlaw bikers, which cause them to start attacking him and his family in revenge.
- Depraved Homosexual: Palle Ollesen keeps a male sex slave bound in his living room.
- Disaster Dominoes: The Central Theme, which is discussed by numerous characters. Events are caused by incidents that happened before, and no one can know what the consequences will be. In the film, the events can be traced back to the theft of Mathilde's bicycle, which caused her and her mother to take the train, which caused Otto give up his seat, which caused the mother to get killed in the explosion. Mathilde uses post-its to track the events back to their origin, though Otto points out that each post-it is part of its own causal chain. Otto believes his algorithm will be able to crunch this sort of data to predict the future. Along the same lines, Markus believes that life as a whole is just a meaningless series of random events. He tells Mathilde that there is no supernatural force providing guidance to the universe, and when prompted to suggest a song for Emmenthaler to play, he says to play "something random."
- Drowning My Sorrows: After the death of his wife, Markus is usually seen sitting in front of multiple empty beer cans.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: The leader of the outlaw biker gang doesn't see all that broken up about the death of his brother. He does, however, have a daughter who seems plugged into her father's nefarious actions.
- Fingore: When the Riders of Justice track down Mathilde's boyfriend Sirius, they interrogate him for the location of Markus and his friends. The leader threaten to break a finger if he doesn't tell them. He then plans to breaks two when Sirius interrupts them, then three for being a snitch and four for when he cries too loudly about it. Luckily, we only get to see two of them being broken.
- Gratuitous English:
- The Riders of Justice have an English name in spite of being a Danish club.
- Emmenthaler tends to use a lot of English curses.
- Magic Feather: Emmenthaler can't play the French Horn unless he's wearing his marching band uniform.
- Manly Facial Hair: Markus wears a large, bushy beard and is an elite soldier.
- Running Gag:
- Lennart's fascination with Markus's large barn.
- People calling Otto's disabled arm a "retard arm."
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
- The girl who wants a blue bike inadvertently sets off the plot, as Mathilde traces the chain of events that put her on the train to her bike being stolen.
- Otto deconstructs the trope as he discusses with Mathilde that if you look back enough there's a near infinite number of those: Whoever taught Otto to give his seat to women, whoever gave that person those moral values, etc...
