"Riders of Justice" is a sharp, funny inquiry into the proposition that nobody ever really knows where they stand in this world, no matter how certain they may be that they do.

Mads Mikkelsen is Markus, a Danish soldier deployed in some hot, dusty war zone when he receives news that his wife, Emma, has died in a subway crash back home. He immediately returns to Denmark to comfort his teenage daughter, Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), who was on the subway with her mom but survived.

Soon after returning, Markus is visited by a man named Otto, a maker of algorithms. Otto was involved in the same subway crash, and he tells Markus it actually wasn't an accident. Consider this, he says: Another passenger killed in the incident was a character known as "Eagle," a now-estranged member of a violent motorcycle gang called Riders of Justice. With the gang's leader currently on trial for murder, Eagle had turned state's evidence and was preparing to testify against him. Otto, a statistician specialized in the area of probability, knows that Eagle's demise was no cosmic fluke. He tells Markus that the chance of a key witness in a gang-related homicide case dying just 13 days before he's scheduled to testify is — hold on — 1 in 234,287,121.

Markus starts buying into Otto's theory, and soon they're joined in their quest for the elusive truth by two of Otto's misfit friends: Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro), an epically overweight computer hothead ("If anything can get my blood boiling, it's monitors with bad resolution"), and a space case named Lennart (Lars Brygmann), who's been in psychotherapy with 25 different shrinks over the years. ("He's in personal contact with pretty much every diagnosis," says Emmenthaler.) These three are eventually thrown together with Mathilde's green-haired boyfriend, Sirius, and a sex-trafficked young man named Bodashka (Gustav Lindh), who's surprisingly free of resentment about the fact that he's basically a human e-bike — available, as he says, for riding by all.

There are also quite a few biker goons, of course, all of them armed and none of them shy about demonstrating it. This is where the icy Markus comes in. Markus has completely internalized all of his fears, frustrations and insecurities and can only deal with them by pounding on people or blowing them away. It works, but it's not ideal, especially in this current situation. When the team fails to locate a key bad guy with Emmenthaler's facial-recognition software, they decide to loosen the biometric parameters just a little bit in order to expand the number of possibilities. This turns out to be a colossally bad idea.

Considering the eternally knotty questions the script poses — Does the universe have purpose, or is life just a series of coincidental interactions? — it's remarkable how funny and touching a film writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen has made from it. Jensen, who already owns a few Oscars for shorts and screenplays, brings a vivid humanism to his work, and you can understand how grateful actors might be to partake of his gift (this is Mikkelsen's fifth film with him). There aren't many movies that can offer action and comedy while at the same time contemplating the possibility that nothing in life actually means anything, although it seems unlikely that this is a notion with which Jensen himself would be aligned. If nothing really matters, his script asks, "Then where do we go with all our sorrow, all our anger, all our fears and loneliness?"

Photo credit Magnolia Pictures.

Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.