I've known for a while that I need to check out the work of Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen, and wound up starting with his latest, "Riders of Justice." It's a mixture of action, comedy, and drama, starring Mads Mikkelsen as a soldier, Markus, who is having trouble connecting to his daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), after the death of his wife. One day a trio of nerdy statisticians, Lennart (Lars Brygmann), Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), and Emmenthaler (Nicholas Bro), approach him with evidence that the train accident that killed his wife may have been a planned attack by a criminal gang, the Riders of Justice. This sends Markus on a quest for vengeance that takes many unexpected twists and turns.
The fun of "Riders of Justice" is trying to figure out what it is, and where it's going. The movie starts out as a series of different scenes that seem to have no connection to each other, illustrating the central theme of the piece - the universe is random, and causality is unknowable. We can't ever really know the reason things happen, so we just have to accept them as they are. The story is full of chance encounters and coincidences, many of them very funny. The ensemble is great, and most of the humor comes out of the character interactions - Markus teaching the statisticians how to use firearms, the statisticians pretending to be crisis counselors around Mathilde, and all the encounters with Mathilde's obnoxious boyfriend Sirius (Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt). What surprised me was how well the drama played out, with Markus having to learn to be a better father, and really grappling with his inner demons. There's action and violence and badassery, but the film is as much about awkwardly trying to connect to other people, and learning the value of supportive family and friends.
I appreciate how low key the film is, just following this group of oddballs as they try and track down their targets, and keep having to deal with various tangents. Reality is heightened, but not as much as you'd think for an action comedy, and the characters are all psychologically pretty down to earth. Markus may be a professional soldier and killing machine, but his most impressive moment is when he finally has an emotional breakthrough and processes some of his grief. The film knowingly punctures some of the common action film tropes, like the impressive computer setups that don't actually do anything useful, or the smug teenage boyfriend who actually turns out to be a good influence. My favorite character is Bodashka (Gustav Lindh), a hapless victim of the Riders who is rescued and recruited by our heroes about halfway through the movie. There's a very winning humaneness to the whole feature that makes it a very satisfying watch.
"No Sudden Move" is Stephen Soderbergh's latest, a period crime film set in 1954. It's the classic simple job that goes off the rails, revealing a much bigger series of crimes and conspiracies in the process. There's an all star cast, a solid script from Ed Solomon, and a ton of atmosphere. I love the opening, where we watch Don Cheadle's world-weary Curt trudge his way home through a Detroit neighborhood, accompanied by the vintage-style credits. Curt is on the outs with a local gangster, Watkins (Bill Duke), and accepts a job from Doug Jones (Brendan Fraser) to help menace an accountant, Matt Wertz (David Harbour) into stealing a certain set of documents. Along with Ronald (Benicio Del Toro) and Charley (Kieran Culkin), Curt holds the Wertz family hostage to get Matt to cooperate. And then things get complicated.
Amy Seimetz, Julia Fox, Ray Liotta, Jon Hamm, and Matt Damon all show up in roles I don't want to spoil, but if you're at all familiar with Stephen Soderbergh, you know how this works. Every character gets their moment to shine, and every performance offers some new delight. The caper hijinks are perfectly executed, the stylized dialogue is endlessly cool, and the momentum never flags even as the plot becomes more and more densely tangled with competing parties and their interests. It's hard to pick out an MVP, because there are so many great moments and unexpected little digressions. The whole initial break-in scene at the Wertz house is great, as each member of the family discovers what's going on. Then there's the surreal turn where the auto industry comes into play. And everything that comes out of Bill Duke's mouth is a treasure.
I don't think "No Sudden Move" is one of Soderbergh's better crime films, because nobody is onscreen long enough to be a truly great character, and the plot is perhaps a little too convoluted. It functions something like a collage of all these different character moments, and all these ideas that never quite reach their full potential. The bigger picture stuff works, and I'm fine with how the movie concludes, but I also can't help feeling that it comes off as slighter than it should. The film ran into production troubles because of the pandemic, and several members of the cast had to be swapped out, so I can't help wondering what the film would have looked like as originally intended. Still, "No Sudden Move" is a fun, easy watch, and well worth checking out.
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