Steering, jabbing, and shooting his way to new heights of action-movie poetry in Jalmari Helander’s Sisu: Road to Revenge, Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) handles big rigs with the skill of Max Rockatansky, grapples goons like James Bond, and is an architect of seemingly impossible acts of mayhem a la Buster Keaton. This sequel to the 2022 sleeper hit is a leaner, meaner effort that sees Helander upping the ante in every possible way in service of a potently simple narrative about the meaning of home that hits like a jack-booted kick to the gut.
After the conclusion of World War II, “the man who refuses to die” is intent on relocating the house where his family was murdered. After dismantling it and loading it on a truck, he and his devoted Bedlington terrier embark on a journey to greener pastures but are soon pursued by Soviets led by Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang). Directly responsible for the death of Aatami’s family, Igor is out to finish what he started at any cost, leading to a breakneck cross-country chase that will either end in death or the putting down of new roots.
Much of Road to Revenge plays like a spectacularly gory silent film, with Aatami taking out scores of Red Army soldiers in action scenes that are as inventive as they are incredibly funny. From tanks soaring end over end through the air to planes corkscrewing off course, Helander is prone to punctuating jaw-dropping stunts with perverse comic beats, as when the pilot of a crashed bi-plane parachutes awkwardly down to Earth or a man, after being rocketed into the air alongside his motorbike, explodes in a piñata-esque drizzle of organs.
With so much bedlam going on, it’s no surprise that Road to Revenge is short on dialogue, with Helander again letting Aatami’s imposing yet quietly soulful presence do most of the talking. In the film’s most entertaining sequence, a naked, blood-smeared Aatami, suggesting a Nordic amalgam of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp and the Grim Reaper, tiptoes through a train car full of soldiers drunkenly snoozing in their bunks and silently sends them to their eternal slumber.
Lang does what’s expected of him as the sort of baddie he could perform with one muscular arm tied behind his back, but he brings a good deal of cruel venom to a speech in which Igor threatens to use the planks from Aatami’s home for railroad ties. This gets at the poetic heart of the hero’s mission in Road to Revenge, which links the memory of his family to his need to reestablish a home. Fans of the first film will know that the title is taken from an “untranslatable” Finnish word that speaks to a particularly obstinate type of bravery, and it’s hard to imagine a more resonant metaphor for the spirit of the country’s people than what Helander simply, elegantly gives us here with a pile of wood and one very determined old man.
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