A leaner, meaner Sisu navigates the furious Road To Revenge in a satisfying sequel
Narrative efficiency and a violent imagination keep the bloody action sequel on target.
Photo: Screen Gems
Finnish writer-director Jalmari Helander’s Sisu, 2022’s stripped-down World War II actioner that played like John Wick by way of Inglourious Basterds, balanced its narrative shrewdness with gnarly bloodletting. It’s the kind of movie where the main character, Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), survives an underwater assault by slitting a Nazi’s throat and breathing through his windpipe. Sisu‘s cartoonish violence, animated by some cheaper-than-they-look visual effects, made the movie a slight B-movie destined for cult status on dorm room walls for years to come. Yet in that film, Helander’s enthusiasm for violent spectacle eventually reached the point where it all became noise. To say its sequel—the leaner, meaner Sisu: Road To Revenge—truly scales things back would be wrong, but Helander does boil his recipe down to its essentials, allowing the Wickian worldbuilding to evaporate and his technical proficiency for cleanly staged chaos to thicken. Road To Revenge is a follow-up so ruthlessly efficient that it can’t even be bothered to give its third lead character a proper name.
Road To Revenge picks up two years after the original. World War II has ended, and Aatami, the so-called “one-man death squad,” is on the road to his homeland of Karelia, now occupied by the Soviet Union. With his trusty terrier in the passenger seat, Aatami drives his flatbed across the desolate Finnish countryside before crossing the border into enemy territory. There are fewer hanged men on the side of the road these days, but still plenty of danger as the Red Army fortifies its new dominion. Though his mission is to dismantle his family’s cottage log by log, load the lumber onto the truck, and find a quiet plot to rebuild, his presence at the border alerts the aforementioned nameless KGB officer (Richard Brake), currently stationed at a Siberian prison. While most, if not all, of the window dressing from the first movie (Aatami’s gold prospecting, any female characters) is left for the vultures, Aatami’s infamy as a one-man Soviet-killing machine has not. Legend has it that Aatami once singlehandedly killed hundreds of Soviets, and even though the war is over, they’d like some payback. It’s not Aatami who travels the road to revenge, but rather the man this nameless officer sends to take him out: Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang), the man who killed Aatami’s family with a shovel. (For all its narrative grace, Road To Revenge at least makes murder seem just a little bit more evil than all the other killings.)
