Sisu: Road to Revenge Review

Writer/director Jalmari Helander's "Sisu: Road to Revenge" doesn't shy away from gory mayhem, but there's an odd emptiness to it. Star Jorma Tommila returns as Aatami from the first "Sisu," and he dispenses henchmen like a hot knife through warm butter, but there isn't much purpose or creativity behind the many, many kills.

This time around, Aatami is bent on retrieving the remains of his former home, now no longer part of Finland, where his wife and two sons were brutally murdered offscreen by Soviet Union soldiers during World War II. Their slaying was done by the hands of Igor, played by Stephen Lang, who we first meet jailed for what I assume were war crimes. Aatami crosses Soviet territory with his cainine friend, but the notoriety of his actions in the first movie prompts KGB officer (Richard Brake) to offer Igor a deal: kill Aatami and you'll get your freedom back. 

And that's it, that's the plot. Aside from a brief opening burb of text, characters only speak in short, terse terms like "time to unleash hell" or something else that probably sounds good in the trailers. This allows the visuals to tell most of the story, and the first hour of Mika Orasmaa's cinematography is often striking, if not haunting, showing dusty roads from high above or rainy prison cells. So it is a shame that the back half of the picture takes place almost entirely on a cramp, creaky locomotive; once you've seen one train car, you've seen them all.

Igor first pursues the legendary Finish hero by car, Aatami trying desperately to cross the boarder with a house's worth of lumber. But that doesn't work, so he calls in a few planes to try and take him out; that doesn't work either. Even when they cause his truck to tumble into the ocean, he always somehow squeaks by. Did I buy the notion that a single man could collect all those planks of wood in the water and makeshift a boat? I could have, had it not been directly followed by him stumbling upon a working tank. A tank that still works somehow, and that he jerry-rigged to carry that same wood.

Again, sure, I can subscribe still, but then he attaches some explosives which somehow causes the military vehicle to flip upwards over a barricaded boarder, and it at this exact moment where I stopped viewing "Sisu: Road to Revenge" as anything other than just another silly action thriller.

The threadbare narrative continues to grow more ridiculous until it buckles under the weight of its own preposterousness and just sorta lies there. A simple tale of revenge like this doesn't need to grow less personal, less intimate to be entertaining. I sat in my reclining leather chair crestfallen that the plot was lost to cinematic excess.

Though Jorma Tommila possesses a great physicality, where he looks to almost come out from the screen and charge at you with an ax, he hasn't much to do here. Though filled with action, he spends almost every frame either walking slowly, blowing away necessary thugs with machine guns or looking concerned while sitting behind the wheel, swerving occasionally to avoid Lang's goons.

While I did appreciate overall lack of dialogue (containing practically as few spoken words as a Charles Bronson flick), anytime someone does speak it was jarring; why English, if the main characters are Finish and Soviets? Why not just cut all the discourse and make this a silent film?

By the way, the dog survives, in case anyone was worried. Why the hell the pup is so loyal after a journey like this is something only mother nature could explain.