The Reel Review
Finland’s legendary one-man killing machine is back, this time taking on the Soviet troops who brutally killed his wife and two young sons during WWII and are now trying to prevent the war hero from transporting the logs of his home in now-Soviet annexed Karelia back to Finland. Jorma Tommila reprises his role in this sequel to the 2023 war action/thriller Sisu, its title a Finnish term for white-knuckled courage and unimaginable determination against overwhelming odds.
Told in several chapters with names like “Incoming” and “The Long Shot,” and enlisting Stephen Lang (the Don’t Breathe and Avatar films) and Richard Brake (Barbarian, Game of Thrones) as the Soviet military villains, writer/director Jalmari Helander again churns out a rip-roaring action film filled with gory, creative kills, a staggeringly high body count and a tremendous amount of violence at the hands of our hero. Some of the wildly ridiculous scenes, however, do require a huge suspension of disbelief.
This way darker sequel, while entertaining, lacks the subversive humor and vengeful charm of the original 2023 film, which had our aging hero wasting German Nazis in Lapland in exceptionally creative and wildly entertaining ways. The Soviet villains just aren’t as interesting. The lump-in-your throat ending, however, is classic Finnish.
REEL FACTS
• Sisu’s main character was inspired by 5’3″ Finnish military sniper Simo Häyhä, the deadliest sniper in history who, nicknamed “White Death” for his masked, all-white camouflage, killed more than 500 enemies over a 100-day period during the 1940 Winter War against the Soviet Union. His face disfigured by a bullet a week before the end of the war, Häyhä died in 2002 at the age of 96, with his long-hidden memoir discovered in 2017.
• Parts of southeastern Finland’s Karelia region were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, forcing 420,000 Finns living there (among them, Häyhä) to evacuate to Finland’s present-day North and South Karelia.
• Although set in Finland, Sisu: Road to Revenge was filmed in Estonia.
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