Film review – Sisu Road to Revenge

My notes on Sisu Road to Revenge

In my notes on Jalmari Helander’s Sisu, I said ‘I’d not be surprised if it founds a franchise’.  So here’s round two with the ukillable Aatami (Jorma Tommila), who embodies the concept of the title (something about lost hope and incredible anger).  In Sisu, Aatami slaughtered a lot of Nazis in the last days of WWII – here, the baddies are Russians … one of Vladimir Putin’s undeniable achievements is making Russian soldiers okay to mow down en masse the way Indians reputedly were in ancient Westerns and robots, zombies and aliens still are in first person shooter games.

A caption explains that at the war’s end, Finland has ceded a lot of territory to the USSR – including Aatami’s log cabin home, his only souvenir of a family murdered with a shovel by Soviet ubergit Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang – ideally matched with Tommila scar for scar).  Aatami crosses the border and dismantles his home, intending to reassemble it in Finland.  A KGB officer (Richard ‘I have never played a sympathetic character’ Brake) finds Draganov in a Siberian cell and offers him freedom and riches if he puts an end to the legend of the immortal, which he was responsible for starting.  That’s about all the plot you get – the rest of the film is a face-off/chase with Aatami trying to get his logs to Finaldn and Draganov determined they’ll become railway sleepers.

Helander channels the Mad Max series, stripped even barer of nuance or character, as more and more goons are thrown to the grinder and Aatami battles – as indestructible as a Looney Tune, if less prone to wisecracking – incredible odds in amazing set-pieces … we get a truck vs a horde of iron-helmed bikers, a duel with fighter planes, and an extended battle through the length of a speeding train.  It has its astonishing gags, coups and casually demented deaths.  This may be the ultimate evolution of the action movie, stewed in decades of shoot ‘em ups but grounded by Finnish historical grudges and generations of war, cowboy and Road Runner movies.  It’ll go over like gangbusters in Ukraine.