SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE:
ANOTHER BLOOD-DRENCHED AND EXPLOSIVE ROAD FOR AATAMI KORPI!
By Nico Beland
Movie Review: *** ½ out of 4
STAGE 6 FILMS AND SCREEN GEMS
Jorma Tommila in Sisu: Road to Revenge
Jorma Tommila (Raid, The Visitor, Big Game) returns as Finnish ex-commando, Aatami Korpi in Sisu: Road to Revenge, the follow-up to the 2022 (2023 in the United States) action war movie hit, Sisu. The first movie was fucking awesome and an unexpected surprise when I went to see it, I hadn’t seen any trailers for it nor did I know anything about it until people kept telling me it was like John Wick in World War II which convinced me to finally go see it and yeah, it’s great.
It is a revenge movie like John Wick, but it’s structured in a similar way to Mad Max: Fury Road or The Raidmixed with the cartoonishly over-the-top violence of Machete. 90 minutes of non-stop action with tons of explosions and bloodshed, but not at the cost of a good story or compelling characters and in these films’ case, it’s a mostly silent protagonist yet Tommila’s facial expressions are a performance in of itself.
Sisu is a damn entertaining action film and stood well on its own, wasn’t sure how to feel when news of the sequel came out. The first one was a pretty self-contained film, Korpi slaughtered the Nazis and had his gold exchanged for bills at the end, where do you go from there? Well, you have him kill a bunch of members of the Soviet Union, of course!
Tommila reprises his role as Aatami Korpi with Jalmari Helander (Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, Big Game) back in the director’s chair and…fuck, it’s still awesome! I don’t know which Sisu movie I like more because both are incredibly entertaining and fun films, but Sisu: Road to Revenge gives exactly what you want to see in a sequel to this movie.
Non-stop bloody violence, explosions, and moments of dark humor, everything that made the first film great just replace the gold with…wooden logs of his house and replace the Nazis with Russians. It’s still the same formula and this is an instance where that’s a good thing and honestly, it doesn’t feel like a complete retread of the first.
The film is set two years after the first film and follows Aatami Korpi (Tommila) crossing the border into Karelia where his family was murdered during the war to dismantle his old family house, load it onto his truck, and rebuild it somewhere safe in their honor. When the Red Army hears of Korpi’s arrival, they send Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang-Tombstone, Avatar franchise, Don’t Breathe 1 and 2), the man who murdered his family to lead a group of soldiers to kill Korpi by any means necessary…that is not at all what happens!
The film also stars Richard Brake (Batman Begins, The Rhythm Section, Barbarian) as the KGB officer who sends Dragonov to capture Korpi.
Overall, Sisu: Road to Revenge gives exactly what it promises if you’ve seen the first and does so in the best way possible. Like its predecessor, the action is front and center and the film itself knows what people are here for and delivers non-stop grisly carnage, shit blowing up, and moments of dark humor and it doesn’t waste any time.
The film is just under 90 minutes so it never overstays its welcome like a lot of big releases from Hollywood, but it uses its time well to give audiences an explosive and gory time at the movies. One aspect about the movie I thought was interesting compared to its predecessor was in the first, the MacGuffin all the bad guys were after was gold which is a lot more valuable whereas here, Korpi is just hauling logs of his old family house to get it through the Finnish border which makes the ultimate goal feel a lot more personal this time around and adds tension to the action.
Speaking of which, the action once again is amazing though this certainly isn’t the most realistic of action sequences in movies, this is a film where Korpi fucking uses a tank with explosives strapped at the rear to launch it over the border, flips around, crashes, and he (and his dog) are somehow unharmed. This is a movie that’s just trying to be fun and it more than succeeds at it, tons of gunfire, blood spurting out, knife fights, brawls, and people getting blown up with some of my favorites being a motorcycle chase that I can only describe as the chase from John Wick: Chapter 3that ends with a Machete movie kill and the best train action sequence since Spider-Man 2 with Korpi raiding the cars to get to Lang’s Dragonov.
Jorma Tommila is wonderful again as Aatami Korpi and like last time, doesn’t have a whole lot of dialogue, but his face, gestures, and actions very cleverly convey who he is and what he’s all about. It made me think back to performances like Charlize Theron’s Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road where sometimes all it takes is a character giving a look to convey the needed emotions though unlike that performance he either doesn’t speak until the end of the movie or in this film’s case, not at all.
Stephen Lang is a great antagonist which shouldn’t be much of a shock given he was also the main antagonist in James Cameron’s Avatar movies and his absolutely terrifying turn as the Blind Man in Don’t Breathe. His performance in this reminds me a little bit of Christoph Waltz from Inglourious Basterds where he’s doing horrible, nasty things and enjoying every second of it, but also has a lot of charisma on top of it leading to some pretty entertaining confrontations between him and Tommila, the kind of villain you just want to see get his blood-splattered comeuppance.
Yeah, Sisu: Road to Revenge gave me exactly what I wanted and expected out of a Sisu sequel and unlike other overblown blockbuster franchises, the formula hasn’t worn thin yet. If you loved the first then you’ll love this one too, it has gory, over-the-top violence with a twisted sense of humor and Jorma Tommila doing what he does best and making a name for himself as a new action movie star.
I had a great time at the theater with this one and I’m sure you will too, where’s Sisu 3 and how much longer do I need to wait for it!?!
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