SISU and SISU: Road to Revenge: A Double-Barreled Shotgun Blast Straight to the Cerebral Cortex, or, Why I Now Believe in Cinematic Valhalla

Alright, dear reader – lean in close, because this is the part where I confess that I thought SISU (2022, that lean, mean Finnish liver-kick of a picture) was perhaps the best movie ever made, full stop, until the sequel dropped like a thermite grenade and turned my entire goddamn worldview into smoking rubble.  I sat there in my  darkened home theater, jaw unhinged, thinking: this is what would happen if Quentin Tarantino stayed up all night consuming industrial quantities of methamphetamine and schnapps and mainlining the entire John Wick franchise back-to-back with every Mad Max: Road Warrior installment, then watched the sun come up over the wasteland and muttered, “Fuck it, I can do better,” before hammering out a script on a typewriter that probably still smelled like cordite and reindeer blood.  Because hot damn – these movies kick ass.  They don’t just kick it; they stomp it into the permafrost, set it on fire, and then piss on the ashes while humming the Finnish national anthem.

Let’s start with the original SISU, shall we?  Because you have to understand the baseline before the escalation makes your skull crack open.  It’s 1944, the tail end of the Continuation War, Lapland’s frozen hellscape where the Nazis are doing their scorched-earth retreat and the Finns are…well, being Finns: stoic, silent, and apparently carved from the same granite as their goddamn saunas.  Our protagonist – Aatami Korpi, played with wordless, granite-faced magnificence by Jorma Tommila – is a grizzled ex-commando turned prospector who’s just struck gold in the Arctic tundra.  Literally.  He’s out there with his horse, his dog, and a pickaxe, minding his own apocalyptic business, when a detachment of retreating SS troops (led by the impeccably vile Bruno Ganz stand-in type, but really, the whole unit is a rogues’ gallery of pure Teutonic sadism) spots him, decides he’s a partisan or a threat or just something to brutalize for sport, and kicks off the most relentless, inventive, balls-to-the-wall revenge rampage since…well, since ever, really.

What follows is 91 minutes of Aatami systematically disabusing the Third Reich of its sense of invincibility thing, using, in no particular order: a pickaxe, a landmine, a tank, a stolen Messerschmitt, and the sheer Newtonian fact that he refuses to die. Body count: somewhere north of “a lot” and south of “everyone.” He spends the entire film without speaking until the last 90 seconds, when he walks into a Helsinki bank, dumps a satchel of gold on the counter, and says, “Bills. Big ones, please. Won’t be so damn heavy to carry.”

Key badass features, annotated for the discerning psychopath:

• The Protagonist Hardly Speaks: One line. Total. The rest is communicated via glares, violence, and a dog who has better instincts than most NATO advisors. Silence, in Aatami’s case, is not emptiness. It’s compression.

• Chapter Titles That Sound Like Heavy Metal Albums: “The Gold,” “The Nazis,” “The Minefield,” and, of course, “Kill ‘Em All.”  Subtlety is for Swiss cinema.

• Deaths as Invention: A man gets hung by his own noose from a plane. Aatami rides a bomb out of a plane like Slim Pickens with a grudge. He crawls out of a swamp, because of course he does.

• Feminist Tangent With Tanks: The Nazi truck full of captive Finnish women arms itself, takes a Panzer, and strings a war criminal from the turret. Aino, their de facto leader, is the only character with a higher kill-to-line-of-dialogue ratio than Aatami.

And then…SISU: Road to Revenge (2025): The Escalation, or How to Murder a Buffer State

Plot, now with 40% more Soviets and 200% more vehicular homicide:

It’s two years later.  1946.  The Winter War is over, WWII is over, and Aatami is still over it.  He returns to his old family house in Karelia – now technically USSR because maps are written by men with armies – where his wife and two sons were murdered by Red Army officer Igor Draganov, played by Stephen Lang, who is here to remind you that he was scarier than the Na’vi in Avatar and he’s not done.

Aatami’s plan: dismantle the house, plank by plank, load it on a truck, and rebuild it somewhere in Finland where the ghosts can sleep.  It’s the most Finnish thing you can do – grief as carpentry.

The KGB’s plan, via Richard Brake’s delightfully reptilian officer: spring Draganov from a Siberian prison and give him “near-endless resources” to kill the legendary ex-soldier by any means necessary.”

What follows is not a chase.  A chase implies one party wants to get away.  Aatami wants to go home.  Draganov wants Aatami dead.  The Soviet state, in its infinite wisdom, throws motorcycles, fighter planes, tanks, and a train at the problem.  Aatami responds by igniting a man with his own Molotov, sending another man headfirst through Draganov’s windshield, and continuing not to talk.

Structure: The film is basically Saving Private Ryan fist-fighting Mad Max: Fury Road in a John Wick parking garage.  It has chapters again, because Jalmari Helander understands that you, the viewer, need a breath before the next war crime.  “Motor Mayhem,” “Incoming,” and a train sequence that Buster Keaton would have called “a bit much.”

Climax, spoilers be damned: Aatami kills Igor, avenging his family.  He rebuilds the house with help from the locals, which is the closest this franchise gets to a hug.  The director calls it a “beautiful ending for the story of Aatami Korpi,” but also admits he might do a third if the idea hits.

Key badass features, now in sequel strength:

1. Still Doesn’t Talk: Still amazing Aatami gets away without speaking at all.  His dialogue is reloading.

• Body Count Inflation: Must’ve got to at least 100.  The first film was a massacre.  This is a census adjustment.

• Villain Upgrade: Lang’s Draganov is arguably worse than his Avatar character.  He’s the man who created Aatami by murdering his family, which makes their final fight less a duet and more an exorcism.

• Pacing as Weapon: R-rated, all over in 90 minutes.  No subplot, no love interest, no TED talk.  Just revenge, compressed until it’s diamond.

Critical consensus: 94% Certified Fresh, 87% audience, same as the first.  The audience understands: you don’t fix what isn’t broken, you just give it more tanks to break.

The Verdict: SISU was the mission statement: a man, a pickaxe, and a grudge.  It was cinema stripped to the studs and rebuilt with barbed wire.  SISU: Road to Revenge is the proof-of-concept scaled up until the I-beams buckle.  It takes the first film’s glorious, wordless brutality and asks, “What if we added a train.”

Together they form a two-film argument that action movies have been too polite for too long.  Aatami Korpi is a force of nature.  He is “sisu” – the Finnish word for the thing that happens when stoicism and spite have a baby and the baby know how to hot-wire a Panzer.  He does not quip.  He does not learn.  He does not die.  He endures, and then he makes everyone else stop enduring.

If you want lore, watch Dune.  If you want monologues, watch Sorkin.  If you want to feel the atavistic, middle-finger thrill of watching a 60-year-old Finn turn the entire Soviet military into a Rube Goldberg machine that outputs corpses, watch these.

I now think cinema is two movies long, and everything else is just trailers.

We ride at dawn.  Bring a pickaxe.

N.P.: “Stick ‘Em Up” – Quarashi