Sisu: Road to Revenge is a Familiar But Fun Highway of Carnage

Sisu: Road to Revenge knows exactly what its audience wants, and gives it to them with both the force and subtlety of a runaway ballistic missile to the head. This could be one of the most violent movies I’ve ever seen, though perhaps my memories of the original Sisu grow dim. It spends every one of its 89 minutes of runtime doing nothing more than trying to outdo the previous bombastic setpiece with a new explosive spectacle by shooting, stabbing, crushing, crunching, and vaporizing every Soviet soldier in sight. Yes, Sony Pictures has traded Nazis for Communists, though the feared Finnish army commander his enemies call The Immortal has remained very much the same. It’s a sequel, though as far as the story goes, the only real connective tissue it shares with its predecessor is a common protagonist and his penchant for ultraviolence. It is the same thing as before, and that’s not always a bad thing.

World War II is over. The treaties that ended it were harsh on Finland, which was forced to cede territory to a Soviet Union that was more interested in how much new land it could occupy than in the well-being of the people who actually lived there. However, I’d bet my finest Finnish oxen that they didn’t account for going up against one of the most brutally violent heroes I’ve ever encountered in a movie. Yes, Aatami is back to beat up the bad guys of history again, except this time, his enemy is communism and its toxic, land-grabbing tendencies. He’s trying to live a peaceful life, though we all know that ex-soldiers don’t really get to have those in movies, and before long, a former KGB agent named Igor Draganov, a man so sadistic that he was imprisoned in the gulag by his own nation, is dispatched to finish him off. Road to Revenge doesn’t ask a lot of hard questions about the nature of warfare, nor does it try to. An angry old man is here to kill communists in the most outlandish ways possible, and his movie cares most about making the carnage fun for us to watch.

Aatami’s an old man living in bad times while being tortured with his memories of good ones, a man whose idea of therapy is unconventional warfare. The movie is split into chapters accompanied by massive titles that appear in the sky, chapters that exist to separate its Aatami-versus-communists setpieces, each of which aims to outdo the one before it. One such setpiece puts the Road in Road to Revenge, featuring a car chase with armored Russian soldiers riding motorcycles, a chase that reminded me of Mad Max because of how cobbled-together the soldiers’ armor looked. Not long after Aatami kills the motorcyclists, because of course he does, he revs his truck engine, racing out of a barn he’s been hiding in as Soviet dive bombers blow it into splinters and towards another similar encounter with communists who want him dead, either because they hate him or fear him, maybe both.

As for Aatami’s main foe, Igor is an unusual villain, a KGB officer who was sent to a Soviet prison because he was too brutal for the Soviets – let that sink in. The former exploits of this thug gave Aatami every reason he would ever need to kill hundreds of Soviet soldiers, and now, the Russians want Igor to finish his job and get rid of this seemingly immortal modern berserker. Any man who is too brutal for the Soviets is not to be trifled with, and I appreciate any villain with a characteristic as unusual as being locked up by his allies because he was too much for them to handle; I sat up and took notice. Stephen Lang with a Russian accent is jarring in all the right ways, even if his dialogue is occasionally difficult to understand in a way that might cause you to switch on the subtitles. Lang plays Igor with such menace, like if his performance as Colonel Quaritch in Avatar were crossed with Rasputin.

The bullets fired here might as well be recycled from the first movie, and honestly? I’m fine with that. What’s next, Aatami going head-to-head with Communist China? Aatami versus aliens? The simplicity of both his movies affords this budding series endless possibilities when it comes to potential future entries. However, I would not come into Road to Revenge looking for any sort of variety in a movie that is almost hostile to it. The only real variety comes from what sort of absurd encounter Aatami and the Soviets will have next. This movie is one setpiece after another, each vying to outdo the one before it, and as crazy as it can get, it still drags once you start to be able to predict what’s going to happen next because you know it will be some summation of what came before.

Still, even if this movie never reaches for the stars, it still thrills in its own way. This is a very violent movie. I caught myself wincing multiple times, and I think you might, too. It can also be really suspenseful. One scene has Aatami do his best to sneak through a train car full of a bunch of sleeping Russian soldiers and creaky floorboards. After seeing what he’s capable of, you may wonder why he needs to sneak at all, but the apprehension is still memorable. Road to Revenge masters the basics, even if it doesn’t care to try and do anything beyond that, and I think that there is something to be said for a movie that doesn’t make more of itself than it already is.

Once again, we’ve been given a movie that channels the one-man-versus-an-army energy of John Wick, but if you’ve seen the original Sisu, you’ll probably know that this movie is going to feel a little grittier, a little more organic, like you can feel the dirt in-between your fingers in a way that you couldn’t with the comparably clinical story of the Baba Yaga. This is a movie that gives you one hyper-violent good guy and a sea of bad guys before letting the good guy go to work, and if you don’t demand anything more of it, I think you’ll have a good time. The action sequences are top-notch in a way that will get your blood pumping, though you may also find yourself wishing that this movie would do something more than raise your heart rate. Either way, there’s a lot of good things to say about it, or maybe the better way to put it is that there aren’t very many bad things to say about it. It’s about an angry miner versus Communism – if you want more, I’m here to tell you that you’ll have more fun if you temper your expectations. Sometimes, philosophy is good, but it’s nothing without the elbow grease of the men on the ground who decide which ideals come out on top. Sisu: Road to Revenge is mighty greasy.

It’s a sweeping gesture that is forceful, not fancy, and that’s not a bad thing. After all, this movie is fun enough to make such a direct attitude work like a thousand-pound bomb to the head. Sometimes we want a commentary on whether or not a director thinks communism was effective, and other times, we just want to watch an angry miner slaughter its adherents. This movie knows its audience well enough to know that it won’t have to apologize to them for its simplicity. Sometimes, a pickaxe to the face is good enough.

Sisu: Road to Revenge – 7/10

Proverbs 14:34