‘Sisu: Road to Revenge’ Review: A Silent Action Hero Who Just Won’t Die
After World War II, a legendary Finnish killing machine tries to rebuild his life by hauling his house back to Finland, plank by plank — but Soviet forces decide it’s safer to hunt him down.
Aatami, the protagonist of Sisu, is not allowed a moment’s peace. In the previous film, he spent his time efficiently dispatching Nazis who were tearing through his native Finland. Now it’s 1946, the war is over, and our silent, brutal antihero believes he’s finally earned a quiet life with his family. That hope lasts roughly until the opening minutes of the film, when he returns home to find that his wife and children have been murdered. This time it wasn’t the Nazis. It was the Soviets. As the film helpfully explains upfront, the Finnish region where they lived, Karelia, has been annexed by the Soviet Union, and the new occupants were not exactly in a neighbourly mood. But Aatami (Jorma Tommila) is not out for revenge. Not officially, at least. His plan is far more practical, and far stranger: he intends to dismantle his house plank by plank, carry it back to what is still Finland, and rebuild his life there. Naturally, things do not go smoothly.
Apart from him, the only other character of real consequence is Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang, best known as the villain from the Avatar franchise, here working at the opposite end of the budgetary spectrum), a Russian convict who murdered Aatami’s family and is promised his freedom if he also manages to kill the man himself. The Soviets know exactly how dangerous Aatami is. His reputation as a killing machine has crossed borders and hardened into legend, and with him wandering around Soviet territory, they would rather not take any chances. So Draganov, along with a sizeable chunk of the local military forces, sets out to finish the job. It is immediately obvious that this will not be easy. And that is all the context you need to sit back and enjoy a brisk succession of spectacular, outrageous and gleefully ridiculous action sequences that unspool over a lean 80-odd minutes.
Once again directed by Jalmari Helander, Sisu: Road to Revenge stands out for its formal discipline. Like its predecessor, it is almost entirely devoid of dialogue (what little there is comes in basic English, delivered with a spectacularly exaggerated Russian accent), and it plays like a cross between a live-action cartoon and a post-apocalyptic action film in the Mad Max or John Wick mould. There are hardly any hand-to-hand fights this time around, but every vehicle and object that appears on screen — trucks, planks, tanks, trains, planes, missiles — is deployed by Helander as if Aatami were a Buster Keaton of modern action cinema. Working with a modest budget, far fewer effects than even a minor Hollywood production, and an almost feral ingenuity for solving absurd problems, this sequel once again proves how talent and imagination can compensate very effectively for a lack of resources.
The bearded, impassive Aatami (we are reminded early on that “Sisu” is not his name, but a Finnish concept roughly meaning courage, grit or resilience) barrels forward on one form of transport or another, accompanied by his dog and the symbolic planks with which he hopes to rebuild his home and his life. Along the way, he faces soldiers on foot, then motorised vehicles, and later planes, tanks and trains, and he consistently manages to outwit and eliminate his pursuers. His inventiveness — and the film’s — lies in turning planks into improbable weapons and ramps, using a tank in a surprisingly acrobatic fashion, and finding extremely creative applications for a few missiles (best not to spoil that particular fun). Add to this a resistance to pain that would make even Rambo quietly jealous, and Aatami seems essentially unkillable. This does not sit well with Draganov, who chases him in growing disbelief as Aatami repeatedly recovers, resets and becomes a threat all over again just when he appears to have been neutralised.
Despite its reputation as an all-out action spectacle, Sisu also scores points as a tightly controlled thriller. It is not wall-to-wall carnage. Helander carefully constructs tense escape sequences, moments of near silence in which Aatami sneaks, plans, lays traps or searches for solutions to the messes he has landed himself in. When you add the comic effect produced by some of the film’s more violently inventive ideas — and even a brief emotional note near the end — it becomes clear that Sisu is not quite as obvious or simplistic as it might initially seem. That said, the sheer impact of the action scenes ensures they remain the main attraction.
The Sisu saga, it hardly needs saying, has no interest whatsoever in realism or plausibility. It is a cartoon with actors, and should be approached first and foremost as a comedy. In that sense, it is a shame the film arrives via streaming, as this is precisely the kind of experience that benefits from a packed cinema, with an audience collectively gasping at every new trick Aatami pulls out of his sleeve (sometimes quite literally) and every new level he clears in this oddly charming war-themed video game. If, after these two films, Helander does not end up working in Hollywood, it can only be because the industry is looking firmly in the wrong direction.
