Sisu: Road to Revenge

The Architecture of Grief

I've spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about what it would actually take to move a house. Not boxes, not furniture—the house itself, taken apart board by board and hauled away on a truck. It is a ridiculous idea for an action movie, which is exactly why *Sisu: Road to Revenge* grabs onto it so hard. Jalmari Helander turns this backbreaking carpentry into something close to ritual. The house belonged to Aatami Korpi's murdered family, and he wants to rebuild it somewhere quiet. Since this is a sequel to 2022's gleefully savage Finnish hit, quiet was never really on the table.



When the first *Sisu* arrived, it felt like the sort of stunt nobody could repeat without exposing the trick. An old gold prospector wiping out a Nazi death squad was such clean, vicious pulp that going back to it could easily have felt cynical. I went in half expecting the law of diminishing returns to kick down the door. It does, a little. The digital effects occasionally give themselves away, swapping the first film’s muddy tactility for a shinier, slightly cartoonish finish. But Helander knows what he’s good at, so he just keeps flooring it. Instead of the original’s more static standoffs, he sends Aatami into a roaring chase across Soviet-occupied Karelia in 1946. *TheWrap* said Helander was chasing an "Indiana Jones kind of vibe," only with "a touch of violence." That’s a very funny way to describe a movie this deranged. The violence gets so outsized it shoots past gruesome and lands somewhere near slapstick.

Let's just talk about the wooden beam. (If you've seen the trailer, you already know which one). Midway through this lunatic chase, Aatami uses an actual chunk of his dismantled living room to bring down a low-flying jet fighter. It should not work. It insults physics, gravity, and basic common sense. I still cheered. The gag lands because Helander gives the absurdity weight. You can see Aatami straining, dirt packed under his fingernails, exhaustion hanging off every movement. He never feels like a superhero. He feels like a man too stubborn to lie down.



A lot of that comes from Jorma Tommila, who doesn’t so much play Aatami as wear him like an old leather jacket. He barely has any dialogue, yet his jaw and shoulders do all the talking. Watch him in the truck cab when the Red Army starts closing in: there’s a quick flash of panic in his eyes, then that familiar hardening. Stephen Lang meets him with equal force as Igor Draganov, the Soviet commander who killed Aatami's family. Lang is clearly having a wonderful time, turning the villainy up just enough to give the movie a solid anchor. The film does want to tap into grief beneath all the hacked limbs, and that part wobbles now and then. As *The Guardian*'s Mike McCahill wrote, its "comic-strip simplicity serves as a rebuke to knottier blockbusters," but that same blunt simplicity can make the mourning feel a little sketchy.



Even so, I can’t dismiss what Helander is doing. He takes the idea of carrying trauma and makes it literal: Aatami is dragging the splintered remains of his past across hostile ground, refusing to surrender them. By the end, with crushed metal and broken bodies everywhere, it feels less like he survived an action movie than like he finally found somewhere to set his ghosts down. If you can live with the flying limbs, it’s a blast. I loved it.