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Finnish action icon takes one last swing in Sisu sequel
With the cumulative pressure of a rocket slowly crushing a living human’s skull, Jorma Tommila makes his grand return as Finland’s only action hero in Sisu: Road to Revenge, a sequel no one asked for.
After wiping out the Nazis in the first film, Aatami Korpi (Tommila) returns to the home in Soviet-controlled Karelia that his wife and children were brutally murdered in.
Dismantling the abandoned house, Aatami hopes to rebuild the structure in his homeland Finland.
Now alerted to his presence in their territory, the Soviet Union releases incarcerated ex-KGB officer Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang) from its Siberian prison and tasks him with killing Aatami, whose legend as “the man who refuses to die” was born from Igor’s actions.
Sharper, harder sequel
That should plainly summarise Sisu: Road to Revenge. At the scientifically-optimal length of being just under 90 minutes long, the film is a lean, mean, Soviet-killing machine.
With no frivolous plot points, unnecessary characters, pointless scenes, hackneyed love interests and anything else that encumbers modern action films, writer-director Jalmari Helander goes for the jugular with the sequel to his surprise hit from three years ago.
This is largely where the film proves to be an improvement. It is the second rodeo for Helander and Tommila at this point, after all.
Fully acquainted with what made the first film a success, what little Road to Revenge adds or removes serves to only make a better action film.
Silent fury, rough humour
In line with how he was in the first Sisu, Aatami is still the silent protagonist – no, scratch that, he is even more silent in this film with zero spoken dialogue. Certainly a feat for an actor from a theatre background, Tommila’s performance as the fictional Finnish commando is an entirely physical one.
Due to the no-talk, all-business nature of the character and how he is essentially a swirling storm of blood, bones, dirt and ash, Helander brings levity to the sequel, starting with how he casts American actors Lang and Brake to play Russian characters with terrible Russian accents, to how 90% of Lang’s dialogue being one-liners delivered like a campy 90s movie villain.
Helander then goes further by bringing physical comedy to the table, no doubt inspired by Buster Keaton, by incorporating random objects such as lumber and even a mousetrap to generate laughter in the film’s tense sequences.
Comedy in adult-rated action films is largely unnecessary, but when it is executed as well as in this film, it compliments the absurdity of the action and stunts. Though the story of Aatami comes to close with Sisu: Road to Revenge, the bloody journey to its end will be well remembered.
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