Sisu: Road to Revenge Review

Sisu has had a strange life. Made by the same team that gave us Rare Exports, it landed fairly quietly at TIFF 2022. Its reception was warm enough, however, to be picked up for distribution. Although its US release didn’t light the box office on fire, it performed quite well relative to its budget and made some waves in online film circles. Its grimy, gleeful excesses placed it in a hyper-stylized and mythological vein just this side of cartoonish, a very successful framework within which to deliver catharsis. A man who wished to leave behind violence is turned into a folk hero before our eyes, someone who embodied the spirit of an entire country, and we got to watch him indiscriminately dismantle the Nazis who stole his gold and left him for dead. There’s even a small subplot in which he armed their female Finnish captives, granting us joyous scenes of the powerless violently rising up against their abusers. And given its filming in Finland’s Lapland, all was set amongst gorgeous (albeit sparse) landscapes with gentle hills and stunning sunsets, spitting in the face of Nazi desecration.

The myth-making story of Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) concluded perfectly, so the production of a sequel was both unnecessary and surprising. The character sprang into being fully formed, but worked because slowly revealing his backstory functioned as a character arc. If we’ve come to its end, and now know exactly how tough and resourceful and dangerous he is, what is there left to do with him?

What if his equal is sent to hunt him down? Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang) doesn’t really live up to that expectation, for while he proves good at tracking Korpi, he leaves the fighting to his incompetent goons. What if the bad guys are different? You’d be hard-pressed to find a villain more satisfying to slaughter than Nazis (especially in 2025), so his pursuers being the Red Army was always going to be a let down, even as they’re shown to be despicable in their own right. What if the already over-the-top violence is further heightened? Sure, but it’s hard to top the surprise of an unassuming man plunging a machete clear through the skull of his harasser. Additionally, there’s no way to do so without turning his vibe away from unassailable badass and into Bugs Bunny, especially given that strapping a missile to a train car feels like it belongs in Looney Tunes.

The sense of veracity is not aided by anything else on screen, either. The desolate yet vibrant landscapes of the Lapland have been traded in for a washed out and gray Estonian landscape masquerading as Karelia. The extensive CGI is poorly concealed throughout, although it’s most noticeable in the copious amounts of rubbery fire. Every frame is more muted, whether it’s the literal color palette or imagery recycled from the original. Even the behavior of the Soviets is nonsense, doing things like driving straight over a plainly visible comrade who’s been thrown into the road. To say nothing of the stupidity of trying desperately to hunt down a man who’s killed hundreds of your men, is well known to have decimated a bunch of Nazis on his own just a couple years before, and is currently leaving you alone.

The story finds Korpi traveling into territory that was ceded to the Soviets in order to retrieve and move his house back into Finland. Cue a bunch of scenes of him trudging towards the Finnish border, dozens of large logs in tow, while the Soviets send groups of soldiers after the one man death machine. As such, Korpi is once again pushed to defend himself with extreme violence. Although here, instead of the movie turning on a midpoint where he is momentarily bested before a superhuman surge spurs him into a berserker rage of revenge, it’s just set piece after set piece of him figuring out new ways to mow through dudes.

That is to say, it gets pretty boring and repetitive. Even the bigger moments don’t make up for how little creativity the movie displays overall. Yes, a tank using a ton of dynamite to front flip over Czech hedgehogs is as fun as it is dumb, but such moments diminish the stakes and make him into a superhero instead of a legend. Focusing so tightly on Korpi’s journey causes your mind to wander, as there isn’t all that much to it. They try to bring in Draganov  gloating about having killed Korpi’s family and enjoyed doing so, but the mute commando doesn’t have enough of a character for us to care, and that beat lands with a solid thud. Unfortunately, Helander thinks he’s found something here, so we keep returning to it despite it never having the intended impact.

There’s still some fun to be had, for sure. There will always be a place in my heart for stylized, grimy, insane action flicks (see: Jimmy and Stiggs). But it’s hard to get past how the best parts of this entry are a retread of the first film, and inferior executions of it at that. Despite the return of the creative team both in front of and behind the camera, a nearly doubled budget, and a proven appetite for its sensibility, Road to Revenge feels more like an opportunistic knockoff than worthy successor. Some of that is my natural skepticism of sequels talking. But when Sisu is sitting right there, a far more accomplished film which definitively conveys the passion of its progenitors, why would I ever return to this?