Riders of Justice; please don't remake this with Liam Neeson

Fun things to ponder; when they hired Mads Mikkelson to be the face of Carlsberg, did they make the calculation that hardly anyone had noticed him playing Hannibal Lecter for three years, or did they think, hell, it’s funny having a cannibal as the quirky face of our product?

Having watched Riders of Justice I now realise that I don’t understand the Danish sense of humour well enough to call it, but it seems way more likely to have been “Hannibal as our spokesmodel? Cooooool!”. There are positively Korean levels of mood whiplash going on at all times in Riders for Justice, which lurches in and out of farce, nerd-mockery, ultra-violence, the philosophy of coincidence and the weight of bereavement as if there aren’t any real differences that matter between any of them.

And somehow it works; each different thing the movie tries to do is done well enough to land, and the characters make enough sense that they can hold all the different tones together somehow. Yes the three computer geeks are walking punchlines, but they’re also somehow kind of compelling as people. Well, OK, maybe not Emmenthaler, who’s a bit too one-note. But Otto and Lennart have a kind of space integrity to their stumbling.

It’s a lot of different kinds of movie all at once. It’s a vengeance movie, it’s a found family movie, it’s a very black comedy, it’s a movie that’s thinking about how nothing really means anything and how we’ll do almost anything to avoid accepting that, including wiping out an entire biker gang.

Mostly though, if you’re in the English speaking world, it’s a movie that has you sitting there thinking “They are totally going to remake this in English with Liam Neeson.” Because it’s a nordic movie about a strong silent man with a set of special skills taking revenge on a gang of criminals who murdered his wife. Hollywood law pretty much requires a US remake with Liam Neeson playing Mads Mikkelson’s role.

And - and hear me out here - Neeson would nail that bit. Mikkelson’s really good as a father making a mess of, well, everything except being mean to Afghans. Neeson could take that bit and do it all over again his own way. The man is, even when he’s not trying, an actor. But Hollywood would screw everything else up. Otto and Lennart would become young hipster hackers. The ache in the middle of the movie would be replaced by simple anger. They’d probably hire Jack Black to play Emmenthaler. And so on. The whole delirious knotty mess of “What tone have we got now?” would go out the window. Hollywood doesn’t have it in it to run with Lennart becoming the world’s worst therapist to an orphaned teenager while Otto explains that it will be fine; after all Lennart’s had 4000 hours of therapy with 25 different therapists; there’s nothing he doesn’t know about how to talk to them.

So, with any luck at all, Riders  will stay just enough below the radar in Hollywood that it can be its own bonkers self, unsullied by a remake. In my own small way, I’m helping that obscurity by talking about it on the world’s most unread blog for post number 600 of something I never thought would get more than dozen posts before I got bored with it.