‘Sisu: Road to Revenge’ Review: Hell Yes
What happened for the explosive sequel of a middling actioner no one asked for, Sisu, to be this good? Usually, sequels experience diminishing returns, where the director repeats what worked in the first film without offering much beyond an effective formula that audiences enjoyed the first time and will likely enjoy again. However, in Sisu: Road to Revenge, Finnish filmmaker Jalmari Helander refuses to repeat his initial installment and instead makes everything more violent and thunderously exhilarating, turning the gritty revenge tale of the silent Aatami (Jorma Tommila) into a playful and operatic Saturday Morning Cartoon.
Of course, purists who believe cinema should only strive to be an “illusion of reality” will hate this movie, especially during a bravura tank sequence that does both The Fast and the Furious and the corpus of S.S. Rajamouli proud. But who honestly gives a damn about “logic” and “realism” when you’ve got 89 relentless minutes of one “coolest thing ever” after another?
The story in Sisu: Road to Revenge
There’s barely any plot. It’s all incredibly threadbare. Everything we need to know about the characters is dumped in front of us during its first five minutes. Aatami wants to return home to Finland. A Soviet Red Army officer, Igor Karanov (Stephen Lang), is determined to kill him before he crosses the border, having murdered his entire family beforehand. He intends to finish the job. Aatami wants to go home. It’s a game of cat and mouse between the two. Who can kill the other first? Perhaps, they’ll kill each other instead.
Helander fragments his story into six chapters (with an epilogue). However, it seems more like a distraction that hampers the movie’s flow when it gets going, because it doesn’t take long for Sisu: Road to Revenge to switch into action mode and never let up from there.
In fact, there are no tangible moments of respite as soon as Helander crafts a car chase worthy of Mad Max and cranks up the absurdity with each passing action set piece. It starts bleak and unrelenting like the first, but quickly becomes more comedic (read: maximalist) as Aatami must find clever ways to defeat a tireless Red Army and a deliriously unhinged officer in his pursuit.
Sequel is pure action movie madness
All of it is preposterous, but that’s precisely why it works, and the fact that Sisu: Road to Revenge is mostly a silent movie that harkens back to the work of Buster Keaton is to Helander’s benefit.
He doesn’t need dialogue to tell a story or to represent intense emotions as bad guys are gloriously butchered in a thousand different ways. He lets his images speak for themselves, and his camera, with cinematographer Mika Oraasma, is much better controlled than in the first film. The images have a more stylized quality and are less self-serious than the original, which made the prior revenge story feel mostly stilted and dull.
In Road to Revenge, Helander seems to understand that, while the dramatic core at the heart of Aatami’s revenge is not fun, everything around it can be. As such, its style must respond to that specific tone and not be afraid to get (a little) silly in the process.
Since it’s pure, unadulterated fun, the camera should be playful, and the intense cutting from Juho Virolainen should add texture to how the action scenes are captured and choreographed. Luckily, Helander has seriously honed his skills as a genre artist and helms a far more confident (and often hilarious) entry than the rest of his (fairly forgettable) filmography.
It’s refreshing to see a filmmaker take his criticisms to heart and work to refine his stylistic impulses rather than make the same thing but with a different antagonist than in the first. There’s an active desire to do something different while also giving more of what audiences liked from the first installment, namely Jorma Tommila leaning further into comedy, as seen in the flourishes we got from him in the prior entry.
Final thoughts on Sisu: Road to Revenge
The 89-minute feature is packed with endless bravura sequences designed to make the audience cheer, hoot, and holler and forget about that wretched (and unimportant) illusion of reality that most movies try to preserve. Every set piece gets more cartoonish—to the film’s benefit—leading up to a train-set climax that feels redundant at first glance but is so thrillingly entertaining one can’t help but have a smile on their face.
Helander balances out active slapstick comedy to build up tension, so the ridiculously in-your-face conclusion feels like a proper send-off to Tommila’s protagonist, who will hopefully build a more peaceful life by the time he’s done exacting the most popcorn-chewing form of revenge you can think of.
It’s also to Helander’s benefit that he got Stephen Lang and Richard Brake to portray the film’s primary antagonists, with the former portraying Igor with the same ferocity as Miles Quaritch, perhaps acting as a primer to what we will see from the veteran actor in Avatar: Fire and Ash.
In any event, no one portrays unhinged pieces of garbage quite like Lang, and the satisfaction one gets when Helander pits both Aatami and Igor together as they duke it out hits like crack. It doesn’t take much, then, for Sisu: Road to Revenge to instill some form of genuine entertainment among audiences, who, during a promotional screening for the film, were having the time of their lives.
I had the time of my life, too, and you, reader, also will. Don’t take my word for it. Just see it. I guarantee you’ll have a better time in front of this than the dreary Wicked: For Good, and your life will probably change for the better if you choose Sisu: Road to Revenge instead of the bloated second part to one of the weakest second acts in musical theater history… consider yourself warned!
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