Sisu: Road to Revenge

### The movie is exactly what you would expect from Sisu 2: - a good balance between possible to survive and plot armor, - total unpredictability while being able to tell exactly what is going to happen in a minute's time, - a piece of art hilarious in its absurd, - a western in Finland. 10/10, can't recommend enough

Ridiculously over-the-top. Insultingly impossible action. Glorious. Look past all of the insane levels of destruction and carnage and you will see the special heart of this story. A man is going to take his family home. It's that simple. Along the way he encounters some.... hurdles that need to be jumped. So he jumps them. Fantastic experience.

I must admit that I’d entirely forgotten about “Sisu” (2022) until I sat down to watch this, and then it all came flooding back. Maybe that is because this isn’t so very different. He (Jorma Tommila) has returned from his native Finland to his former home in what is now Soviet occupied Karelia to collect it. Yep, he is going to dismantle the wooden home he built for his murdered family and relocate it across the border. The Soviets still remember the carnage he caused last time around, and so release his erstwhile tormentor “Dragunov” (Stephen Lang) from a gulag with instructions to terminate him and earn his freedom (and lots of roubles). What now ensues is like a militaristic game of snakes and ladders as “Sisu” faces soldiers, armoured cars, fighter planes and even a train as he tries to stay alive long enough to make it home with his logs. Now I don’t think there is even the slightest hint of jeopardy here, indeed it pretty much screams the continuining adventures of “Sisu” from the start, but it’s really good fun if you like mindless violence, a good old-fashioned baddie straight out of an Ian Fleming novel and loads of combat scenes that would easily have killed him, and just about everyone else, a hundred times over. Ever seen anyone somersault a tank? There is a bit of dialogue, but it’s entirely unnecessary as the bullets fly and the blood flows, and we build to a denouement that almost makes you cry! This production has seen considerable effort gone into it, there’s gore galore and I did quite enjoy it for ninety minutes.

"Sisu: Road to Revenge" is a polished case of "style over substance" with a predictable, anti-Russian message. All the trappings are there. Excellent sets, spectacular cinamatography, at times entertaining, if over the top action and capable acting, from the cast. What's missing is anything that truly looks like a intelligently rendered back story. What made the first "Rambo" film work so well, putting the intense action aside for a moment, was a truly heartfelt back story, with a character, who, at least for one film had personal depth, that was wholly relatable, wholly "human". This film aspires in this direction, early on and looks like its could get there but quickly devolves, into what feels a lot like a "Call of Duty" style, computer game, where you kill everything in sight, until there is very little left, not only to see but, in this case, to empathise with. The director and writers, try to reignite the emotional component, of this film, at the end, with the house building scene but by then, any emotional potential, has long since departed. In summary, this film is a platform, for a mega-ton of over the top, at times viceral, gritty, action but that's as far as it gets. Looking beyond the superficial death and destruction, it's disappointlingly shallow. An okay watch.

About as good as the last one. I think a bit tighter. Can we kill the old man fighting genre? Dude’s cool and all but there’s a lot of old dudes fighting. Too much old dudes fighting and planes maintaining altitude while sideways. Spoilers. Dude should have let the dog cross the border without the tank. Like if they let the dog go anyway, could have saved it some grief. It was not adequately prepared for the tank.

Our intro is met with a heavy realization that just because the war was over, it didn't help the natives of the lands that were once occupied by the German, as the Russian decided they needed some of the land they re-aquired through the war. The scene is tense upon the start, and appears to be filled with regret and a Hate brought on by the Ravages of War. The Wicked have set the game in motion and our Sisu is in Rare Form dealing our the Justice required upon these Demons in Human Skin. I love how Evil Men think that they are Warranted Revenge on those they've Committed Atrocious Acts upon, and then they see that they've Enacted Vengeance upon their Foolish Followers. The kills are Legendary and Inspired, Death befalls the Wicked in this viewers eyes. I'm finding it Interesting how the Defeated German are being Aided by the Russian in this story, and I find that it Pisses me off at their Cowardly Collusion with the these Vile Human Beings. I'm also seeing that the Finnish Special Forces that began as the "ErP 4" in World War II along with the "Sissi Troops" and are nothing to be Sneered upon and then ultimately on becoming "Utti Jaeger Regiment". I didn't think it was possible to Outshine the Hell Unleashed, but I didn't give enough credit to the Vengeance being Unleashed this time around. ***Spoiler*** Gratifying and Supremely Emotional Ending

Rambo II - this time it's logistical! As the first Sisu-movie, this is just Rambo, but Finnish. This time the antagonist is not a Nazi but a Soviet, and the kills are a lot more over the top than in the last one. Some things are more ludicrous than the last movie, and if that bothers you then you are at the wrong movie. The protagonist has no lines worth mentioning, and unlike the last one when he had some badass backup to tell his story, it becomes far more "showing, not telling". The ending is more explosive than last time, and the very end more heartfelt. I enjoyed this, as absurd as it was.

For action film fans whose thirst for seeing fascists shuffling off their mortal coils in increasingly brutal ways were not quite slaked after the excellent **SISU** (2022), **SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE** picks up where our legendary Finnish ex-soldier Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) left off. Writer and director Jalmari Helander of both SISU films shows no sign of accumulating rust with even more breathtaking scenes of shock and awe as Aatami, riven with grief, crosses into Russian-occupied Finland in 1946 to return to his home and retrieve some semblance of the life cruelly taken from him during the war. As the film's title suggests, this next chapter becomes very personal when Russian military brass, alerted of the unkillable Finnish legend, release from a Siberian prison the person -- a very game Stephen Lang as Igor Dragonov -- directly responsible for the brutal murders of Aatami's family -- with the promise of a significant bounty if he can complete the job. For the next 120km Aatami's road back to the Finnish border becomes a cat and mouse game with tanks, Molotov cocktails, runaway trains, strafing machine gunfire from above, and white-knuckled rage from Tommila's very tough-as-nails performance literally embodying the spirit of Sisu -- for which, in the sequel, we are told in Finnish means, "determination, steadfastness" against impossible odds. What an apt understatement! The entire film is the best cinematic example in recent memory of FAFO! As Lang and Tommila square off towards an inevitable showdown, the film becomes an orgy of death, dismemberment and all-out action that will have fans, such as myself, demanding another adventure with the indomitable Aatami. At just 89-minutes, I felt like little Oliver Twist holding up an empty bowl -- asking, desperately, "Please sir, I want some more."