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Grief, guilt, and revenge animate resonant RIDERS OF JUSTICE

14 Friday May 2021

Posted by cinepam in Reviews

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Anders Thomas Jensen, Andrea Heick Gadeberg, Lars Brygmann, Mads Mikkelsen, Nicolas Bro, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Riders of Justice

A soldier returns from duty in Iraq or Afghanistan after his wife’s death in a train accident and turns into a merciless avenger when he becomes convinced that his spouse was actually collateral damage in a vicious conspiracy. That Death Wish trope activates the plot in this Danish drama that reunites filmmaker Anders Thomas Jensen with frequent collaborators Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas, but things are never that simple-minded with Jensen. Instead of a revenge thriller, Riders of Justice is a violent, sometimes darkly funny but also surprising and warm observation of people grappling with grief, guilt, and the human impulse to make sense out of the incomprehensible.

A young girl’s wish for a blue bicycle for Christmas is what sets the film in motion. She has nothing to do with anyone else in the film. She doesn’t even live in Denmark, but her stated desire is the first link in a chain reaction that explodes into madness. Markus (Mikkelsen) adds another link with his decision to stay at his military post rather than return home for a visit with his family. Data scientist Otto (Kaas) forms one more link as a survivor of the train accident. But perhaps the most important link is the member of the Riders of Justice motorcycle gang who left his wheels home and took the train on that fateful afternoon.

While Markus and Otto are convinced that somehow the motorcycle gang is responsible for what the authorities deem an accident, they are each, in their own way grappling with guilt that implicates them in the event. Markus’ wife and daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg) would not have been on the train had he come home. Otto has survivor’s guilt and not only for this one event.

Together, they are a mess. Otto at least has a support system in fumbling colleagues Lennart (Lars Brygmann) and Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro). They rally around Markus and Mathilde, too, but Markus is too much inside his own head to accept emotional support or to give it. He is useless to Mathilde, unable to offer the solace she desperately needs.

There are many pleasures in Riders of Justice, from the arresting performances of Mikkelsen, Kaas, and the rest of the cast to Jensen’s nuanced, complex screenplay to the chaos unleashed on the bikers by Markus and his oddball band of science geek brothers.

But what is most entrancing is watching Markus, Mathilde, Otto and his colleagues, and others drawn into their orbit slowly come together for far more emotionally resonant reasons than simple vengeance and seeing Markus – a man apparently dead inside long before he lost his wife – gradually return to the land of the living.

Riders of Justice is a rare film. Movies with this much brutal action are not supposed to leave audiences feeling warm and fuzzy about humanity. With the aid of his wonderful ensemble, especially Mikkelsen, in this latest work, Jensen manages exactly that. –Pam Grady

Riders of Justice is playing in theaters.

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Mikkelsen battles the elements in ARCTIC 

07 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by cinepam in Reviews

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Arctic, Joe Penna, Mads Mikkelsen, Ryan Morrison

ARCTIC_HS_040317__DSC8682 copy

Six years ago, writer/director J.C. Chandor placed an elderly sailor played by Robert Redford in the middle of the sea on a yacht steadily taking on water in the tense and nearly wordless All Is Lost. As a tale of a man trying to survive against all odds it was irresistible. Arctic, from director Joe Penna and his co-writer Ryan Morrison, is another such indelible story with similar notes to Chandor’s story but taking place in a remote, frozen wilderness after a plane crash. Mads Mikkelsen rivets in this suspenseful drama as a resourceful man who refuses to surrender to the apparent hopelessness of his situation. 

The film opens sometime after the crash. Who Mikkelsen is, what his role was on the plane, and how many people died in the disaster are questions Penna and Morrison never attempt to answer. Instead, we are introduced to this sole survivor stomping through the snow to write “SOS” in large enough letters to be seen by passing aircraft and checking fishing lines sunk into holes cut into the ice, the catch his only source of food. How long he’s been stranded is open to question, but when he strips off his socks at night before getting into his sleeping bag, he reveals feet ruined by frostbite. 

Circumstances eventually force him out of the relative safety of the plane fuselage and into the wilderness in search of a settlement where he will find rescue. Blowing snow, subzero temperatures, a questionable map, a hungry polar bear, and a blanketed topography that hides unseen dangers might end the man’s life at any moment. Still, he perseveres. Rarely has the adage, “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” been better illustrated. 

São Paulo, Brazil, native Penna makes his feature debut in this icy climate, shooting on a forbidding volcanic plateau in Iceland a world away from the sunny, subtropical temperatures of his homeland. Stunning cinematography by Tómas Örn Tómasson depicts an endless, snow-draped landscape of lethal beauty. That this was a shoot with a high degree of difficulty is evident in every frame, a situation which only underlines the dire straits Mikkelsen’s character faces. That thin line between life and death that accompanies us all every day of our existence is frayed, stretched, and nearly obliterated, but the man soldiers on. 

With little dialogue and no back story to speak of, Mikkelsen nevertheless creates a character we come to care about, his actions pointing to someone whose life we would like to see saved even as the odds against just that continue to grow. This is one of the Danish actor’s great performances. Penna and Morrison set the stage in writing a tale of nonstop suspense, but it is Mikkelsen who transforms an ice-bound thriller into something bigger, a saga of a human being reaching beyond his limits through his sheer will to live. —Pam Grady 

 

 

 

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