Sisu: Road to Revenge — Because Apparently the First One Wasn’t Wild Enough
By Thom Erst
Rating: A-
If you saw director Jalmari Helander’s Sisu, then you already know how far a filmmaker can push the needle on excessive, against-all-odds violence.
But if you see Sisu: Road to Revenge, you realize Sisu wasn’t the main event — it was the warm-up match. The polite handshake before the bell rings and the real fight begins.
Helander — Finland’s answer to Chad Stahelski if Stahelski were to cull in a few favours from Sergio Leone and run them by Quentin Tarantino for approval — returns with a sequel that doesn’t so much raise the bar as use the bar to beat the living daylights out of anything that might seem even remotely possible.
Helander directs like he’s filed a restraining order against logic and has banned physics from the set entirely. A poster tagline could read, “You will believe a tank can fly!” because the film practically dares you not to.
The trick — and it is a trick — is that no matter how outrageous, absurd, impossible, or cartoonish the stunt, the audience remains completely on board, willingly suspending not only disbelief but also common sense and any lingering attachment to the laws of gravity. Go ahead, scoff at the logistics of propelling a tank over a border wall. Sisu fans will take that fight to the parking lot.
If John Wick is a ballet of ultra-violent choreography, then Sisu: Road to Revenge is its bad-ass country cousin: a full-body-contact square dance where you don’t just swing your partner to the left, but off the top of a speeding train, headfirst into a tree.
Once again, we find ourselves in the company of the quiet but lethal Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila)— a man whose resting face appears carved from stone, chipped away by war and grief. Once a military legend (circa 1947), he now lives in self-imposed exile, guided by a moral compass that points due leave-me-the-fuck-alone. He’s steel-eyed and speaks in a silence so vivid it could use subtitles. He follows a single rule: you don’t bother him, and he won’t turn you into a statistic.
Most people — anyone within whispering distance of the legend — know better than to test that rule. But there is always one fool. In the first Sisu, it was a platoon of gold-hungry rogue Nazis. This time, the unwelcome intruders are Russians, led by Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang), a recently freed war prisoner tasked with eliminating the meddlesome Korpi in exchange for his freedom.
Arguably, Draganov is the evil inverse of Korpi — sharing the same killer stare, weathered to rugged perfection; the same survival instincts sharpened to outlast any obstacle out to destroy them; and the same unforgiving streak that leaves no room for mercy. They’re cut from similar cloth, except Draganov’s has been soaked in something toxic while Korpi’s cloth is dipped in remorse. With the Red Army at his disposal, Draganov sets out to squash the reclusive Korpi once and for all.
Draganov would have been wise to have screened the first Sisu before agreeing to any deal.
Korpi, meanwhile, is once again trying to rebuild his life — literally this time. He’s dismantled the ruined home he once shared with his wife and children, a house originally on Finnish soil before shifting borders stranded it on Russian land.
His plan is simple: haul the pieces back where they belong and start again. But peace never lasts long for a man who refuses to back down from a fight. And so, he hits the road, this time hauling lumber instead of gold.
When Korpi realizes Draganov is the man responsible for the deepest wound in his life, any hesitation evaporates. Settling the score becomes less an obligation and more a calling. And so, our reluctant warrior is dragged back into the violence he’s spent years trying — and failing — to outrun. Once a celebrated hero, he’s become something stranger and much scarier: a legend, yes, but also a recurring nightmare for whichever batch of villains decides it’s their turn to bring him down.
There is a third villain in the mix — a slimy, untrustworthy Red Army Commander played to unscrupulous perfection by Richard Brake. It’s a pyramid scheme of villainy, each rung slicker than the one beneath it, and Brake’s effete, self-important sneer marks him as the guy for whom the movie seems eager to invent new forms of payback.
It was Nazis before, now it’s Russians, but honestly, does it matter? At this point, it could be a rampaging herd of demonic grannies, and we’d still be rooting for Korpi to win.
Adding to the fun, the film is broken into bold, self-aware chapter titles — grand biblical pronouncements that treat each violent escalation like a new book in the gospel of vengeance. Sisu doesn’t just know what it is; it grabs the mic and announces it like the second coming.
Road to Revenge requires a complete surrender of logic — and by the time the final chapter slams onto the screen, you’re more than willing to offer that surrender. In a cinematic world full of self-serious actioners, Helander gives us a rare gift of a film that knows exactly how ridiculous it is… and revels in that ridiculousness with explosive, gleeful conviction.
Sisu: Road to Revenge is directed by Jalmari Helander and stars Jorma Tommila, Stephen Lang, and Richard Brake. Sisu: Road to Revenge is currently playing is select theatres.