Entertainment magazine called Riders of Justice, our next Shuswap Film Society movie, “the loony Danish action thriller you didn’t know you needed.”
On one level it’s your basic revenge story with guns and bloodshed, but underneath it’s more about fate, chance, coincidences, justice and other subjects rarely discussed in films.
An explosion rips through a Copenhagen train killing Markus’ wife Emma and traumatizing his teenage daughter Mathilde. Mathilde seeks answers and Markus, returned from deployment, seeks revenge. Otto, a statistician, was on the train and would have perished had he not given his seat to Emma. He theorizes that the accident was a deliberate hit to eliminate a court witness and the other victims collateral damage. With his two colleagues, a hacker and an IT whiz, all emotional misfits, he takes his evidence to Markus.
Markus and the three become an oddball platoon, trying to determine if the crash was a premeditated crime or the culmination of a series of things that quite simply happened. Can the sequence of events be understood and, by extension, can some reason be attributed to why his wife was so senselessly lost? As they uncover layer upon layer of ulterior motive and misdirection, they end up on a collision course with the Riders of Justice gang.
Writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen has a knack for creating stories that seem straightforward but then twist and turn, taking us to unexpected places. Riders of Justice is brutal, deep, funny and strangely moving – a revenge movie with a soul.
Riders of Justice, subtitled, plays at the Salmar Classic on Saturday, Nov. 13 at 5 and 7:30, p.m.
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