Riders of Justice (spoiler free)

I spotted last weekend that this film had arrived on Hulu, and yesterday I made time to watch it. Markus (Mads Mikkelsen) is a soldier whose wife is killed in a train crash, and he returns home from deployment to look after his teenaged daughter. A statistician who survived the crash becomes convinced it wasn't an accident, and recruits his tech friends to help him find proof. When the police won't listen, he takes his story to Markus, and they set out to find the suspected culprits.

There's a lot of set up and character establishment in this film before it really kicks off. The first big Anders Thomas Jensen 'OMG, WTF is going to happen now' moment comes about forty minutes in, and it's utterly sold by all the expressions crossing Lars Brygmann's face. Absolute acting genius.

From there it jinks all over the place in classic Jensen style, with hefty doses of droll deadpan humour and some classic one-liners. It's a black comedy revenge fantasy, but there's also a lot of heart to the film, and all the characters are dealing with issues that are given some serious emotional weight (yes, Mads gets his obligatory Major Acting Scene). Sometimes found family is an emotionally stunted soldier, his daughter, and three geeks who will help you plan multiple murders. Plus one other that I won't talk about to spoil the surprise :-)

I think my favourite of Jensen's films is still Adam's Apples, but this one probably comes in second. Would absolutely watch it again.

What If... (spoiler free)

We watched the last of this series tonight. It evolved well, starting off very much as an anthology series, and then the last few episodes formed an arc that dragged in threads from many of the earlier stories.

There were some nice moments towards the end - clearly the authors of the series hold the same attitude to the 'Steve Rogers goes back to the past' conclusion to the MCU arc that the fans did, which is amusing.

Like any anthology series, there were a couple of episodes that were definitely weaker than the rest, but overall it was solid. Some episodes were just plain silly, others were very much a downer, and it's good that the writers were left to choose the tone they wanted. Enjoyed watching it, won't bother to watch again.