Sisu Review | “Shhh… Don’t Overthink It…”

Skin deep, but satisfying, the ultra-gory Finnish action thriller Sisu is a movie that fits perfectly in line with audience expectation these days. Since films like John Wick and The Raid came about and redefined what it means to be an action hero, audiences keep clamouring for movies built around an unstoppable, seemingly bulletproof hero with a bigger than expected heart on a noble quest to absolutely obliterate a bunch of easily loathed villains with extreme prejudice. I could really just stop there, and one would know precisely everything there is to know about Sisu, but for the sake of padding things out, I’ll go on.

In the dying days of World War II, the Nazis are laying waste to Finland with an all out, last ditch, “scorched earth” approach. As battles rage all around him, a man named Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) has decided to leave the war behind him. He sets off into the Lapland countryside to pan for gold, hoping to find enough of the stuff to get him even further away from the fighting. Flanked by his horse and faithful pooch, Aatami finds a literal motherlode and begins the arduous process of trying to get it back to town and into his bank account. En route, he’s cut off by a group of Nazi soldiers – led by Askel Hennie’s taciturn commanding officer – with a bunch of young women as prisoners who decide to target the middle aged nobody and make his huge discovery into their nest egg for when the war ends. What they don’t know is that Aatami was once a soldier so accomplished in the art of killing that he was seen as a one man death squad.

Sisu comes from a word that has no literal English translation, but it roughly approximates to “stoic, gritty, and brave resilience.” The main character and overall tone of Sisu certainly lives up to such a definition. It’s a movie about an entire army of jerks who’ve managed to piss off an unstoppable killing machine, and the whole thing lasts ninety minutes. People are shot, stabbed, beaten, hung, bled, chopped up, and blown to absolute fuckin’ smithereens in the most brutal ways possible. If Sisu doesn’t sound like something you would vibe with, I guarantee you that it isn’t. If Sisu sounds like your idea of a good time, then you’ll have fun with it. I love when reviews are this cut and dry, and Sisu is the type of film that makes my job easy. There’s not much to overthink or analyze here.

And for the record, yes, I had fun, although your mileage may vary. I love great art, but sometimes you just want to watch someone mow down dozens of Nazis in less time than it takes some of us to get dressed in the morning. It’s another winner from Finnish genre filmmaker Jalmari Hellander, who made similarly pleasing flicks Big Game and Rare Exports. (The young star from both of those films, Onni Tommila, also returns here as one of the ill fated soldiers.) He’s turning out to be a filmmaker who always understands the assignment at hand and makes the best movie possible from the material. While a lot of Sisu is patently ridiculous and unbelievable (like staggering the number of times Aatami escapes any sort of injury at the hands of bombs or tank rounds being lobbed at him), the spirit is more than willing and able. It goes from Point A to Point B exactly as it should, and the results don’t ever disappoint. It will give the audience for this sort of thing exactly what they want, no more, no less, no overthinking necessary; the definition of “lean and mean.”

Sisu opens in theatres everywhere starting Friday, April 28, 2023.