Riders of Justice gives Mads Mikkelsen his best-reviewed action film, and the number is hard to miss: a 96% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. Released in 2020, the film sits well above the usual genre noise and turns a dark revenge story into one of the sharpest entries in Anders Thomas Jensen's run with Mikkelsen.
Mikkelsen and Jensen's fifth film
Over two and a half decades, Anders Thomas Jensen has never made a feature without Mikkelsen, and Riders of Justice is their fifth film together. That long partnership matters here because Jensen is working in a register he knows well: deadpan humor, eccentric characters, raw violence, and moral unease, only this time the action is more direct and the comedy lands against grief rather than around it.
Mikkelsen plays Markus, a taciturn and highly skilled soldier who returns from Afghanistan to look after his teen daughter, Mathilde, after her mother is killed in a train accident. Andrea Heick Gadeberg plays Mathilde, and the family setup gives the film its emotional pressure before the revenge plot even starts moving.
Otto's train claim
Otto is the pivot. He tells Markus that the death was no accident but a deliberate attack by the local motorcycle gang, Riders of Justice, and says he knows because he was on the same train. Markus then teams up with Otto and two of his friends to deliver retribution, which pushes the film from domestic loss into organized retaliation.
The result is a dark comedy with brutal action that keeps its center on trauma, revenge, and the way people build certainty from fragments. The film's 89% Popcornmeter score suggests viewers responded too, but the critical number is the headline here: 96% is not just strong for an action movie, it is strong enough to make this one of Mikkelsen's clearest calling cards outside his more visible work in American movies and TV.
Rotten Tomatoes and Popcornmeter
For readers deciding whether to watch it on TV, the scoring split is the useful takeaway. Critics have put Riders of Justice at 96%, while viewers have it at 89% on the Popcornmeter, a combination that usually signals a film with enough craft to satisfy both the review aggregation crowd and the audience side of the ledger.
That leaves Otto's claim as the film's unresolved engine. He says the train death was deliberate, but the film does not spell out how much evidence he actually has, and that uncertainty is what keeps Markus's response from feeling clean or simple.
