20 great movies from the past 20 years: Riders of Justice

I’m counting down to the 2025 best-of-the-year season by recommending 20 of my favorite movies from the past 20 years. Here are the previous entries, if you want to catch up:

2005: Caché
2006: Undisputed II: Last Man Standing
2007: Sunshine
2008: Speed Racer
2009: Vengeance
2010: Unstoppable
2011: The Three Musketeers
2012: Eega
2013: Rope A Dope
2014: Hill of Freedom
2015: SPL 2: A Time for Consequences
2016: Love & Friendship
2017: Mersal
2018: Infinite Football
2019: Dark Waters

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I’ve been waiting to get to today’s movie this entire series: The countdown was largely inspired by my desire to rewatch Riders of Justice, a hidden Danish gem starring Mads Mikkelsen released in the Movie Dead Zone™️of mid-2020 to mid-2021. It’s a smart and funny revenge thriller that complicates the genre’s relationship to violence, but remains criminally underseen and discussed. Let’s change that together.

After the tragic death of his wife in a train crash, soldier Markus (Mads Mikkelsen) is surprised to meet mathematician Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) at his doorstep. Otto is the recently fired inventor of an all-powerful algorithm, and the algorithm says the tragedy – which also killed a gang member shortly before he was set to testify against his crew – was no accident. Welcoming the opportunity to make sense of his loss, Markus joins Otto and his idiosyncratic group of math nerd friends on a quest to get to the bottom of things. 

Otto believes that there is no such thing as coincidence, and that every event is caused by a series of events leading up to them. As this mass of events is too large for a human brain to comprehend, Otto created the algorithm to comprehend it for him (watching Riders of Justice in the midst of the AI bubble is quite the experience). His hope is to prevent catastrophes by predicting them ahead of time, but his bosses fire him for wasting precious time on the expensive side project. While helping Markus with the fallout of his wife’s death replaces Otto’s now-empty hours, Otto is also here to find some solace for his own unintended role in the tragedy – he was on the same train as Markus’s wife, and gave her the fateful seat that led to her death.

The revenge movie is an appealing but often thorny sub-genre of the action thriller, promising retribution against cruelty, usually by positing violence as the only path forward. Revenge movies often navigate this by showing the hero succumbing to darkness, or showing how the path of revenge can take just as much from you as the inciting incident that brought you there. But Riders of Justice takes a very different, much sharper approach to the genre and the allure of revenge, subverting the traditional expectations and structures of revenge thrillers. It would be easy to describe the movie as “Men would literally rather take down an entire criminal syndicate than go to therapy,” but the truth (and the movie’s relationship to grief and therapy) is more nuanced than that.

Markus is a hardened Mads Mikkelsen role – shaved head, full salt and pepper beard, logical and practical to a fault with a rugged military demeanor. But even under that emotionally distant machismo, Mikkelsen conveys a deep well of feeling. His character makes a great contrast for the disheveled, socially inept mathematicians who follow him around like lemmings, constantly bickering and citing obscure statistical figures. But Markus’s hardness also pairs well with his teenage daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), who he’s spent little time with because of his overseas tours. She’s much more emotionally mature than her father, and is trying to make sense of the tragedy in her own ways. He thinks he knows what’s best for her, but hardly knows who she is and what she values. 

Riders of Justice is a thoughtful movie about loss and grief with metatextual commentary on its own genre, but it’s also an effective, tense thriller with a strong balance of action, comedy, and drama. It’s a movie about trying to make sense of the horrible things that happen in our world, the seemingly irresistible pull of violence in cinema and in life, and it’s a fun hang with an odd group of guys investigating a mystery together and building a new family unit in the process. 

Riders of Justice is available to watch for free with a library card on Hoopla and Kanopy.