Finnish writer / director Jalmari Helander's Sisu: Road to Revenge is the sequel to his 2022 marauding mayhem movie Sisu, which also starred his brother-in-law Jorma Tommila, as a Finnish WWII soldier battling in the first film thieving Germans and this time sadistic Russians.
Tommila's Aatami Korpi has killed scores of Russian officers to avenge the destruction of Finnish villages annexed by Russia after the war. Homes were destroyed, people were displaced or killed, like Korpi's family. Korpi has returned to the homestead, with the family's Bedlington terrier (a nice touch, BTW) to retrieve what's left of his life.
A Russian officer (Richard Brake) tells a psychopath chained up in a Siberian prison -- Stephen Lang's curdling Yeagor Dragunov -- that in exchange for his freedom and a sizeable monetary reward, Dragunov is to take out Korpi before he makes it back across the Finnish border.
The stage is set for a chase, and like all films in the road rage genre that began with George Miller's Mad Max in 1979, Sisu 2 is structured around escalating levels of vehicular carnage. In this case, deaths start with evisceration and decapitation and increase outlandishly over the picture's 90 minutes.
Tommila is in his mid-60s and is an impressive avenging angel; he doesn't speak a word in the picture but conveys great emotional intensity, nonetheless. Though covered with grime, dirt and blood for the entire movie, Korpi's pure industriousness will win over audiences, even while he's emptying machine guns into a platoon of Red Army fighters.
In a way, Road to Revenge could have been given the pitch line "Wicked for Good," but I understand that's been taken.Finnish writer / director Jalmari Helander's Sisu: Road to Revenge is the sequel to his 2022 marauding mayhem movie Sisu, which also starred his brother-in-law Jorma Tommila, as a Finnish WWII soldier battling in the first film thieving Germans and this time sadistic Russians.
Tommila's Aatami Korpi has killed scores of Russian officers to avenge the destruction of Finnish villages annexed by Russia after the war. Homes were destroyed, people were displaced or killed, like Korpi's family. Korpi has returned to the homestead, with the family's Bedlington terrier (a nice touch, BTW) to retrieve what's left of his life.
A Russian officer (Richard Brake) tells a psychopath chained up in a Siberian prison -- Stephen Lang's curdling Yeagor Dragunov -- that in exchange for his freedom and a sizeable monetary reward, Dragunov is to take out Korpi before he makes it back across the Finnish border.
The stage is set for a chase, and like all films in the road rage genre that began with George Miller's Mad Max in 1979, Sisu 2 is structured around escalating levels of vehicular carnage. In this case, deaths start with evisceration and decapitation and increase outlandishly over the picture's 90 minutes.
Tommila is in his mid-60s and is an impressive avenging angel; he doesn't speak a word in the picture but conveys great emotional intensity, nonetheless. Though covered with grime, dirt and blood for the entire movie, Korpi's pure industriousness will win over audiences, even while he's emptying machine guns into a platoon of Red Army fighters.
In a way, Road to Revenge could have been given the pitch line "Wicked for Good," but I understand that's been taken.
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