Action films might be the closest argument we still have for cinema as a universal language. It’s the most exportable genre, with stars and filmmakers like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean Claude Van Damme, Jean Reno, John Woo, Bong Jong Ho, Jaume Collet-Serra — just to name a few obvious examples — continually crisscrossing the globe in an international network of familiarly paced, plotted, and structured, yet still regionally-flavored, carnage. Finnish director Jalmari Helander’s Sisu: Road to Revenge makes a compelling case that this might not be such a good thing. A little idiosyncrasy can go a long way, and for whatever Sisu has in terms of well-choreographed mayhem, it lacks a lot more in personality. It boils down the genre to its basest parts — it’s intensely, purposefully, linear, little more than one non-stop, gory, nearly dialogue-free, and characterless ride from point A to point B with few surprises in between — while doing little to add anything else to the mix. It could be an extended trailer for a video game or, if it were a little more bare-bones, laser-focused, and imaginative, an exercise in structuralist minimalism. It constantly feels as if it’s evoking something larger, some greater world or action set piece that could give meaning to it all, but that never quite materializes — and never really existed in the first place.
Set just after WWII, the film opens on a sentimental note: grey, bearded, weary-faced Finnish ex-Army commando Aatami Korpi, or The Immortal as the Soviets call him (Jorma Tommila), crosses the border into ex-Finnish land recently seized by the Soviet Union. He’s there to visit his old house, and after taking one long nostalgic look around, he tears the entire log cabin apart, loads it onto the back of his truck, and heads back toward the border to rebuild it in Finland. The Soviets, however, won’t let things go so simply. They want him, and the legend that has materialized around him, dead. They spring ruthless killer Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang, with an atrociously hammy Russian accent) from Siberia, give him a small army, and put him on Korpi’s trail. What follows is one long chase across soviet Russia as Korpi takes down all manner of motorcycle, jeep, tank, plane, and train out to destroy him.
In its relentless forward momentum and vehicular-based action, the film almost deliberately evokes George Miller’s masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road. Yet where Miller surrounded the destruction with imaginative Campbellian worldbuilding, precise political allegory, and at least a patina of character development, Sisu: Road to Revenge aims for little more than cartoonish displays of over-the-top gore delivered with a Looney Tunes-esque sense of physics and a gear-headed fetish for 1940s war technology. There’s almost no development beyond the initial setup, and Korpi is not only completely dialogueless throughout the film, but his facial expression rarely changes from the bug-eyed constipated look Tommila deploys anytime an enemy approaches. Even the white labradoodle Korpi takes with him across his journey fails to add more than a generic and quickly tiresome cuteness. It’s all entertaining enough, but it’s never more than that, and Helander lacks the personality or perversity to render any of the fight scenes as anything other than smoothly delivered and lightly clever. And the closest thing one can grasp onto as a theme is the anti-Russian overtone that is incredibly empty, propagandistic, and even laughable. If there’s any upside to the lazy light topicality, it at least makes war look not so fun, not so interesting, and not so noble as one would expect — and hope — a movie like this would manage.
DIRECTOR: Jalmari Helander; CAST: Jorma Tommila, Stephen Lang, Richard Brake, Tommi Korpela; DISTRIBUTOR: Screen Gems; IN THEATERS: November 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 29 min.
Originally published as part of Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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