Sisu: Road to Revenge (dir. Jalmari Helander)

By: Adam Freed

For Helsinki-based director Jalmari Helander (Sisu, Big Game), the formula is really quite simple.  First pit a captivatingly magnetic underdog against insurmountable odds and provide just enough pressure to cause the physical manifestation of the Finnish term “Sisu” to boil to the surface.  While the titular term holds no direct English translation, Helander opens both Sisu (2022) and its sequel Sisu: Road to Revenge with an on screen reminder that “Sisu” is a form of courage and tenacity that is only possible to harvest against the most extreme forms of adversity.  Fortunately for audiences, extreme is the best way to describe the plight of former WWII commando Aatami Korpi, played with agonizing intensity by Jorma Tommila (Sisu, Big Game), who fresh off of laying waste to a band of renegade Nazis, returns to the newly redrawn Finnish / Soviet border to recoup what is left of his home and move it back to newly plotted Finnish soil.  As the film’s title would suggest, Sisu: Road to Revenge is not the peaceful story of a man attempting to start postwar life anew in Lapland, but rather a teeth-clenching, bare-knuckled genre celebration of man’s tenacity when pushed to the edge.

Jalmari Helander’s latest bombastic post-war action adventure elevates the art of high interest, low investment genre filmmaking seemingly extinct in modern Hollywood.  To the layperson, Road to Revenge’s violently minimalistic presentation may read like a poor man’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), but unlike George Miller’s high-concept, balloon-budgeted project, there is a welcome understated quality and quaintness to the destruction Helander unfolds.  In many ways Sisu: Road to Revenge is a genre manifestation of the type of warm reservation present within the Finnish people.  The densely packed 85 minute film unfolds a parade of practical stuntwork, taking place by land, by sea and by air. In a world of high complexity action filmmaking there’s something darkly refreshing about witnessing an elderly European commando earn his vengeance one Soviet scalp at a time.  The eventuality of that revenge leads to a secondary highlight of the Sisu sequel.   Korpi, the story’s protagonist, who utters no lines of dialogue throughout the film, is set on a collision course with his primary antagonist, Yeagor Dragunov, a Soviet Commander responsible for taking the lives of his wife and children years before.  Dragunov is played by a menacing Stephen Lang (Avatar, Don’t Breathe), who provides the film with a much needed counterbalance and the personal need for vengeance. 

The secret sauce behind the success of the Finnish action franchise is that tonally it wishes to be taken deadly seriously within its action set pieces, but never asks audiences to hold the entirety of the proceedings as precious. This slim path of distinction that Sisu: Road to Revenge walks so well, allows permission to partake in the laugh out loud moments that come draped in a spattering of bloodshed and carnage.  Jalmari Helander once again proves daring and confident in his direction of a sequel that in lesser hands, would’ve likely missed the mark desperately.  Long live quality reminders that genre films are an important additive to the film ecosystem and that in a sea of expository dialogue, a picture can still be worth a thousand words.

Target Score 7/10 -  Visually intriguing and brilliantly minimalistic, Sisu: Road to Revenge is the panacea for formulaic action filmmaking.  Jalmari Helander once again offers a tightly choreographed and immensely satisfying post World War II action experience.