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Toronto After Dark 2025 Review: SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE Really Really Really Loves Blowing Up Commies

Contributing Writer; Toronto, Canada
Toronto After Dark 2025 Review: SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE Really Really Really Loves Blowing Up Commies
After the epic Western-Thunderdome Nazi-killing smorgasbord that was Sisu, Finnish director Jalmari Helander returns to his large northern Europe canvas for another round of battle with Finland’s enemies. This time, it's in the key of Mad Max: Fury Road, against an arrogant and sadistic Soviet Army, in Sisu: Road to Revenge (hereafter, Sisu 2).
 
Stoic ex-soldier Aatami, along with his faithful Bedlington Terrier, return to show the kind of guts and bottomless resolve that exudes patriotism without the need for flag-waving. One would think after the first film there would be nowhere left to go, action-wise, with a sequel.
 
But shifting out of Indiana-Jones inspired set-pieces -- for the most part, but not entirely, this time delving into Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny -- and into Looney Tunes levels of mayhem, for which physics is only the merest of suggestions, Helander finds a way to execute a bigger, brassier, gonzo-hilarious sequel, one that is on par with Gremlins to Gremlins 2 or Evil Dead to Evil Dead II’s great leap from the absurd to absurdist self-aware parody.
 
The film is set in 1946, after the U.S.S.R. annexed hundreds of square kilometres of Finnish territory as a buffer to the West after the war. The territory now includes Aatami’s unoccupied family home, and that is simply not going to stand.
 
While Sisu 2 is the furthest thing imaginable from a political statement, the parable to Ukraine cannot help but be noticed here, and will likely amplify any bloodthirsty notions to see Soviet-era Russians dispatched in myriad ways, as one man reclaims a piece of sovereign territory.

 Driving the kind of heavy-duty industrial truck straight out of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer across the U.S.S.R. border, Aatami dismantles his homestead, labels the pieces, and loads them up for the drive back. Of course, nothing is that easy.
 
Long before striking gold in the wilderness, during the previous Russian-Finland war going on in the deep snow during WWII, a sadistic officer named Igor Draganov murdered his wife and kids. The Soviet brass, getting word that Aatami is on Russian land, release Draganov from the Siberian prison he was rotting in, restore his officer status, and give him a glorious haircut, and the resources to not only kill Aatami, but erase his legend entirely.
 
Stephen Lang brings a certain relish to the villain role here. A kind of ironic indifference to his job, even as he relishes the challenge. Dragonov does not seem terribly motivated by the money or status he is being offered, and he is not backed into the kind of corner that made Askell Hennie’s world-weary Nazi commander almost becomes sympathetic at the end of Sisu.
 
Instead, he is more of a cartoonish moustache twirler, who loves what he does. And what a spectacular moustache it is. Lang is more than up to the challenge, bringing a truckload of winking-sadism and style to the role. Somehow, he manages to get increasing mileage every single time he slowly removes his wire-framed spectacles for emphasis.
 
Jorma Tommila manages to pull off a heroically nuanced performance without uttering a single word of dialogue during the chaos. It reminds of me how the Coen Brothers had this joke with Steve Buscemi. As Buscemi's parts got bigger in the Coen’s films, his character was always killed at some point, and the remains got smaller, from his shot-corpse kicking off the plot of Miller’s Crossing to his ashes on the Dude’s face in The Big Lebowski. With each picture Tommila and Herander collaborate, Tommila has fewer words. Here he has none. This is even acknowledged in the sweet masculine epilogue to the film.
 
Scored with a the same didgeridoo-Valhalla vibe, and splattered with blood and soil, Sisu 2 is a far way from re-inventing the wheel. It is a bigger, explosion-laden cavalcade of the familiar, the very definition of ‘knowing the assignment’ kind of filmmaking. If the first Sisu was nuke-the-fridge kind of fun, Sisu 2 launches the fridge, the house, and the whole neighbourhood into the whirlwind.
 
But if you peek past the bombast, it also relishes the small, dare I say human, moments, emphasizing how aged faces look when rendered in close-up by the 2.25:1 aspect ratio. One could get lost in the craggy visage of Richard Brake’s Russian admiral, who manages somehow to out-cheek-bone both Peter Cushing and Pete Postlethwaite. Tomilla and Lang mostly stare at each other for the opportunity of the camera to evaluate their facial expressions.
 
Helander, of course, has a savant-like talent for over-the-top action, but he also has a gift for capturing and framing epic establishing shots among the vistas that Finland has to offer. An early sunset shot of a windmill with a dead man hanging from one of the arms while a truck rumbles by is magnificent. As is a long tracking shot of a plane flying along a lime-stone cliff-line. A tank vaulting through the air into a dense Nordic forest has its own kind of quiet majesty. 
 
But mostly, the film is a high-fructose sugar rush of dispatching various Russian bad guys. I mean, who is against killing Soviet Commies in 2025?
 

Sisu

Director(s)
  • Jalmari Helander
Writer(s)
  • Jalmari Helander
Cast
  • Jorma Tommila
  • Aksel Hennie
  • Jack Doolan
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Action MovieCommunistsFinlandJalmari HelanderJorma TommilaRichard BrakeRoad to RevengeRussiaSisuSisu 2SovietsStephen LangWorld War IIAksel HennieJack DoolanActionDramaThriller

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