Boy, talk about a movie that didn’t need a sequel.
Sisu was 90 solid minutes of Nazi-slaughtering fun. It was a gloriously gory bit of grindhouse mania, dripping with Finnish nationalism by way of a protagonist more unstoppably violent than Jason Fucking Voorhees. Nobody could ask for anything more, and we certainly couldn’t have asked for a sequel.
Yet somehow, here we are with Sisu: Road to Revenge, with writer/director Jalmari Helander and star Jorma Tommila both returning. Alas, the Nazis will not be returning, as the first movie quite pointedly took place at the end of the war while the Nazis were on their way out. Instead, we’ve got Soviets for our one-dimensional baddies this time. Not quite as satisfying, but at least we’ve got Stephen Lang acting well within his wheelhouse to make up the difference.
Our premise begins in 1944, while Finland is still caught in between the ongoing war between the Third Reich and the U.S.S.R. (as detailed in the previous movie). Somewhere along the way, a large swath of Finnish territory was permanently ceded to Russia. Thousands of Finns were displaced, never to see their homes again.
And guess what? One of those Finns just happened to be Aatami, our silent killing machine, played once again by Tommila.
Presumably, Aatami used his gold from the last movie to get himself a passport and a truck as indestructible as he is. Equipped with both, Aatami crosses the Soviet border to go back to his old home in occupied Finland. He then proceeds to literally dismantle his old home, plank by plank, so he can load the pieces up on his truck and re-assemble it back in Finland.
Naturally, there’s a complication. Mostly by way of Stephen Lang’s character, name of Igor Draganov.
See, at some point in the war, Draganov and his army unit were personally responsible for murdering Aatami’s wife and children. This predictably led to a retaliatory bloodbath that somehow resulted in Draganov locked up in a Siberian prison and all his men dead. In turn, this led to Aatami’s legendary reputation as an immortal killing machine.
And now the Soviets know that Aatami has crossed their borders into their territory. So naturally, they offer Draganov his freedom and a hefty payday in return for Aatami’s capture. There are so many reasons why this is a fatally stupid plan.
To their credit, Aatami isn’t up against a bunch of hapless Nazis too ignorant to know they pissed off the wrong miner. These Soviets know what they’re dealing with, and they’re not taking any chances. Then again, if the Soviets really knew what they were dealing with, they would’ve known enough to leave the stubborn bastard alone. And they probably shouldn’t have sent the psychopath who failed to stop Aatami in the first place.
There’s also the matter of why the Soviets were satisfied with merely capturing Aatami instead of killing him. The logic goes that outright killing him would basically martyr him. It’s not enough to kill the man with a blaze of glory, they also have to kill the legend with a disgraceful, drawn-out death. I might further add that Aatami would be locked up for the rest of his life in a Siberian prison cell. Even if he somehow really is immortal, there are worse things than death.
Those are all sound ideas in theory. Unfortunately, that all only works if there’s a prison that can hold this particular fucker.
The title isn’t merely artistic — pretty much every scene takes place on or around some form of transit. The first half takes place on the road in Aatami’s aforementioned truck. The second half takes place on a train. And in between, there’s a stupidly awesome stunt with a tank.
Aside from that vehicular flavor — which really does make all the difference — what we’ve got here is more of the same. It’s another 90 solid minutes of one-dimensional baddies getting gruesomely slaughtered in creatively over-the-top ways by a man who simply refuses to die. Good fun all around, not much here to try and over-analyze. But there are a couple of nitpicks.
The big one for me is the dog. Yes, Aatami’s dog makes a welcome return, providing Aatami with someone to protect while also giving us a bit of comic relief. Unfortunately, the dog is entirely absent through the back half of the movie. Until he reappears again at the finale, with no explanation of how the nine hells that could be possible or where the dog was in the interim.
The other big problem is that the previous movie had a crew of captured women, growing more emboldened until they could fight back in the climax. I liked having a parallel storyline to show that the central concept of sisu was so much greater than any one man. There’s none of that in the sequel — nothing but Aatami, Draganov, and whatever poor stupid thugs get in between them. That lack of such a populist, feminist, “fuck yeah” moment feels like a significant downgrade.
Otherwise, I don’t know what else there is to say about Sisu: Road to Revenge — like its prequel, the film speaks pretty damn loudly for itself. Nothing but pure blood-soaked action and innovative stunts, as simple and straightforward as a landmine to the face.
The only real potential downside here is that the filmmakers are so tightly focused on Aatami — his stunts, his internal drama, his status as a living metaphorical embodiment of Finnish national pride and perseverance — that it doesn’t attempt or deliver much of anything else. The filmmakers don’t even try to bring us a Stephen Lang role much better or different than any of his other villain roles.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with specialization. I can respect a film that only does one thing, so long as it does that one thing damn well. And that’s exactly what we’ve got here.