Sisu: Road To Revenge

Bluesky

As the first film told us, 'Sisu' is untranslateable, and as the first film also told us, it means something akin to determination, to grit, a particular stoicism and tenaciousness that become something sui generis, suomi generis if you will.

This second film struggles a little as it's a product of success, not adversity. Striking gold, on- and off-screen, does not always augur well. Veins run dry, of blood and treasure both. Sisu: Road To Revenge, to give it the full title, has all four elements. Plenty of sisu, a few hundred kilometers of road, a prequel to justify the preposition's pronunciation and enough retribution to fill a couple of graveyards.

It is awkward enough to justify a dead wife and family as motivation in 2025 but it's probably harder for writer/director Jalmari Helander as his film's star, Jorma Tommila, is his brother-in-law. At least he has form for awkward Christmases so can probably navigate those questions come Nativity. We will, with the aid of some lovingly textured maps and a neat bit of forced perspective, gloss over how Finland came to be opposed to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A whole region has seen its occupants displaced, and Aatami Korpi is among them. He is going to his now empty home, dog in tow, to see what he can salvage.

This return is noticed across the Iron Curtain, or at least its birch and barbed wire northernmost equivalent. Far across too, as from a Siberian gulag, Stephen Lang's Igor Draganov is given an offer he can't refuse. Revenge Russia against the Finn, admittedly for the violence he enacted in vengeance for familicide, and fortune and freedom await. The only obstacle in this cycle of revenge is that special forces captain Korpi bears the nickname of 'Koschei The Deathless'. This seems more of an attempt to establish him in a taxonomy of bedtime story badasses in the vein of John Wick than any fabulous parallel. Korpi doesn't keep his heart in a box or have a forbidden room, but he is making a claim for immortality.

I shan't list all the litany of violent nonsenses enacted. At one point, on what I think was an abandoned airfield, I might have spotted the fuselage of an anachronistic Su-25 Frogfoot, but that was perhaps in lieu of Baba Yaga's chicken-leg hut. I may have imagined it too, distracted by bulletproof bikers on a Finnwards Fury Road. Its automotive acrobatics are outstripped by some tank gymnastics, a lumbering dogfight, sneak attacks from the sky and a portentous tarpaulin. My usual aviation pedantry aside, I did have the opportunity to count the road-wheels to determine which flavour of Josef Stalin's namesake was co-opted.

Steeliness is in no short supply, though episodically delivered. Seven chapters give us home, old enemies, motor mayhem; "incoming" is two-fold, "long shot" even more so; revenge is delivered in spades and the final chapter is reassuringly straightforward in its labelling. The presence of a radio "handy-talky" wouldn't have caused me to blow a fuse if a call of "Unleash hell!" wasn't followed by a purgatorial pause. That does give us time to establish a few more details, though it does sometimes feel like hiding a copy of a battle-action comic in the catalogue for a landscape gallery. At just under an hour and a half this felt quite a bit longer. There are points where its engines overheat, others where they shut down, but many more where it isn't firing on all cylinders.

I was entertained, in much the same way but not to the same extent as the first outing. The set-pieces are entertaining enough, though the distance between them can be wearing. There's also a bit of an issue with escalation. In order to justify the horrors our protagonist will inflict, greater, more surviveable horrors must be enacted upon him. Injuries are grittier than those of Frankenstein, but balance between gratuitous gore and the grand guignol would be harder to draw than the blood spattered along the trail. It's not anemic; iron is abundant as both will and haemoglobin. It is hearty fare too, but arrhythmically; its beats are strong but inconstant. With this further display of sisu, persistence is rewarded, but audiences shouldn't have to supply quite as much.

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