Director: Jalmari Helander
Writer: Jalmari Helander
Stars: Jorma Tommila, Stephen Lang, Richard Brake
Synopsis: A man returns to dismantle his family’s house, where they were murdered in war, to rebuild it elsewhere. When the killer, a Red Army commander, tracks him down, a brutal cross-country pursuit begins.
Sisu: Road to Revenge is the kind of breathless action-film experience that prides itself on finding new ways to create so much carnage, you’ll need a shower afterwards to rid yourself of the overwrought blood and guts that you’ll be showered with over 89 minutes. The film is bloody, gory, and darkly comic. The experience is pure white-knuckle ferocity, oozing jaw-dropping action and set pieces that give the audience what they ravenously crave.
Of course, it helps when you have a hair-raising, exhilarating performance from Jorma Tommila, who brings so much brooding, simmering intensity, with very little dialogue, that it feels like a slow, smoldering burn radiating tension and surprising emotional depth. You just wish director and writer Jalmari Helander knew how to rein in their ambition a bit, especially now that they have double the budget to work with.
The last time we saw legendary Finnish soldier Aatami Korpi (Tommila), he was cleaning a large combat knife with a Nazi’s severed head and using the ones that remained as target practice with live mines while fighting his way through the blazing northern Finnish plains occupied by dozens of Hitler’s regiments. However, as we soon find out, money isn’t everything. Korpi wants to bring his home back to Karelia, a no man’s land located between Finland and northern Russia, where his family was murdered.
This is his home, so he dismantles each piece of wood himself, carefully loads them onto a large truck, and plans to relocate the lumber to his hometown. However, there is one problem, since Germany wants revenge on the man who just won’t die. So they let loose a killer even more ruthless than himself. That would be Igo Draganov (legendary character actor Stephen Lang), a Soviet Red Army officer who was the trigger for Aatami’s bloody walk that will live in infamy.
If Draganov catches Korpi and apprehends him, handing him over to German control, they will let him go and finance his freedom. Not a bad deal, considering he has been stuck rotting in Hitler’s wet-dream of a prison for years. So he grabs soldiers, Kradschützen (motorcycle riflemen), Bomberfliegers (bomber pilots), cluster bombs from a Heinkel He 111, machine guns, smoking bullets, sharp knives and blunt ones, not to mention a missile on a train that gets lit up like a Christmas tree.
Sisu: Road to Revenge is bloody fun, with some eye-popping action set pieces that offer howling thrills. Yes, most of the scenes are ridiculous, but they are so surprising in their execution that it hardly matters. (In particular, the scene where he manages to avoid a kamikaze-style attack had me laughing so hard I began choking on my popcorn.) Keep in mind, this is all happening with his adorable Bedlington Terrier at his side. The scenes are adrenaline-fueled armrest-grabbers that hit you viscerally like a hammer.
These are accomplished in a myriad of ways. The breathtaking dive-bomb scenes are majestic, including shots of fighters flying sideways to avoid tall, thin Scots pines. It even includes an homage to the truck scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.. Helander also knows how to build suspense, with a terrific scene where the main character tries to tiptoe his bloody and bruised body through multiple train cars filled with sleepy German soldiers.
That is also where the film begins to falter. As with the original Sisu, the movie goes too far, just as it did with the plane crash scene, when Tommila’s Aatami and Lang’s Igo come to their final blows. The scenes become almost grotesque, to the point where Helander needs to learn how to rein himself in. The sequel offers too much of a good thing. While still enjoyable, the gory self-indulgence comes close to ruining the picture, but there’s enough there to provide a mild recommendation.
You can watch Sisu: Road to Revenge only in theaters starting November 21st!
