The action spectacular of the year stars a 66-year-old man in a speeding truck. “Sisu: Road to Revenge” declares its intention in the title — it’s a scrappy, indie translation of “Mad Max: Fury Road.”
The year is 1946 and the setting is a stretch of Finland recently absorbed into the USSR. Our hero, a weary Finnish commando named Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), has dirt smudged into every wrinkle of his brow. After spending the war killing Nazis, he could use a nice, hot bath. (You can watch returning director Jalmari Helander’s 2022 “Sisu” for that massacre, but I’d just start here.)
Alas, Korpi can’t relax. His log cabin home is now in Soviet territory. So Korpi dismantles his house, loads the timber into a cargo truck and, with his dog riding shotgun, drives 75 miles to Finland’s new border, pursued by an equally tough brute: diabolical Red Army officer Igor Draganov (“Avatar’s” Stephen Lang) who’s under orders to destroy this folk rebel.
In Finnish, “sisu” means tenacity and grit. But subtitles aren’t necessary. This story is told through explosions and gunfire, glares and smirks. Lang’s Russian heel speaks English; Tommila’s Korpi says nothing — the character doesn’t talk. But he does outrace a pack of motorcycles and an airplane. You should see what he does with a train.
“Sisu: Road to Revenge” is an ode to high-throttle classics like “Die Hard” and Buster Keaton’s “The General.” Helander’s unabashed homages may as well be spelled out in gasoline and set ablaze. I’m positive I saw “Jaws” and “Looney Tunes” in there, too, and now is a fine time to mention that his next project is a reboot of “Rambo.”
Yet, Helander’s most impressive stunt is that he’s made a movie that’s still very much his own. His mash-up feels fresh, just as the bombastic score by Juri Seppä and Tuomas Wäinölä boldly borrows Ennio Morricone’s soaring horns and wah-wah-waaah squawks while adding its own gargle of Finnish throat singing.
The adventure is structured like a serial with each segment starring a seemingly impossible threat. Quickly, a couple things become evident. First, Korpi is stubbornly hard to kill and Draganov knows this chase can’t end until he sees his enemy’s corpse. (Anything shy of that means Korpi has escaped and is figuring out his next move.) Second, Lang’s hilarious Draganov will crush anyone who gets in his way. Running over one of his own Russian bikers, he grunts in annoyance. How dare the guy become a speed bump?
Oh, and the mayhem escalates fast. No sooner has Korpi made it through the third manic section, titled “Motor Mayhem,” than a peeved Draganov tells his squad to “unleash hell.” Now? We’ve already been there and back — and we’re only 30 minutes in with an hour left to go.
Helander and editor Juho Virolainen pace the carnage like slapstick. They have a nimble rhythm for how many times a victim can dodge disaster before splattering. The violence is so big that it becomes comedy, even getting us laughing at a severed head, twice.
It’s a tricky tone that occasionally goes off the rails, say during an awful shot of a flogged back or an unbearable moment where the dog whines in distress. (I’m morally obligated to assure you that the pup will be fine.) One machine-gun death has the kind of drumroll punchline that’s only for sickos.
But mostly, “Sisu” playfully mines humor out of how hard Korpi tries not to kill people, attacking only when attacked. Draganov treats him like a grizzly bear, hissing “Don’t move!” to an underling when Korpi makes eye contact with their car. The fool reaches for his pistol. Big mistake. When Korpi creeps through a gauntlet of sleeping soldiers, you hope they stay snoring for their own safety.
The character has a scrap of backstory in a photo of his dead wife and kids, pathos that Tommila’s weary, teary blue eyes hit a little too hard. But it’s Korpi’s silence that makes the film feel mythic. Meanwhile, Mika Orasmaa’s cinematography has the gusto to send a camera zipping up to the clouds and hurtling back down. In one jaw-dropping shot, a skinny plane flies on its side through a thick birch forest. The image is a stunner. So, too, are its rocky cliffs and vistas striped in shades of yellow, steel-blue and orange.
The film was shot in Estonia, but plays like a salute to the beauty of the Baltic coast. When Korpi pulls over to fix a tire, he pauses to listen to the birds. Their chirps are the sound of the old battle-ax saying goodbye to his homeland before the Iron Curtain slams shut. The war is technically over, but its horrors are still so recent that Helander pans across a marsh of fallen men whom no one has bothered to bury. He seems to find it dubious that the treaty that ceded this land will bring about lasting peace. It’s haunted by too many ghosts.
Yet, it’s worth mentioning that “Road to Revenge” has more respect for its bad guys than the 2022 original did for its craven SS platoon, one nose-pick away from goose-stepping inbreds. Here, the Russian conscripts are either mean but brave or they just have rotten luck. The blame for their demise always goes to the bosses treating their own troops like fodder.
This chain of cruelty goes all the way up to the KBG officer (veteran Hollywood villain Richard Brake) who vows to send Draganov back to Siberia if he fails to take down Korpi. “Siberia is a very bad place to be immortal,” Draganov warns Korpi, a threat that adds heft to each punch as these roughnecks trade blows.
Over 400,000 Finns lost their homes in the fallout of World War II. Tommila’s fictional Korpi doesn’t need to say a peep to get us thinking about how other filmmakers could make modern sequels set in Syria, Sudan, Palestine and Ukraine — and about how Finland continues to closely watch this same 830-mile border.
Just this week, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb said that the European allies should face Russia together with sisu, teaching others his country’s term for steadfast courage. He even embroidered the word on his back. This first-rate B-picture couldn’t ask for better branding.
The post Speed to the theater for ‘Sisu: Road to Revenge,’ Finland’s madcap take on ‘Fury Road’ appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
