Sisu (2023) Lionsgate/Action RT: 91 minutes Rated R (strong bloody violence, gore and language) Director: Jalmari Helander Screenplay: Jalmari Helander Music: Juri Seppa and Tuomas Wainola Cinematography: Kjell Lagerroos Release date: April 28, 2023 (US) Cast: Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie, Jack Doolan, Mimosa Willamo, Onni Tommila. Box Office: $7.3M (US)/$14.3M (World)
Rating: ****
Exploitation movies, bring ‘em back! I’ve been saying it for years. It looks like somebody finally heard my psychic plea. Writer-director Jalmari Helander, best known for the cult Christmas film Rare Exports, gets down and dirty with Sisu, a Finnish-made/English-language actioner that pits a lone prospector against a Nazi army. This guy is Rambo and Clint Eastwood rolled into one. A man of few words, he’s more apt to ram a knife into an enemy’s skull than exchange a single word with him. He does that and more in this blood-drenched tale of grit and determination which, according to the opening titles, is the closest English translation of the term “Sisu”.
Set in 1944 Lapland, Aatami Korpi (Tommila, the dad from Rare Exports) is a loner who spends his days searching for gold. All his hard work finally pays off when he unburies a huge cache of it, enough to set him up for life. Atop his trusty horse and with his little gray dog running alongside him, he heads to the nearest town (which isn’t all that nearby) to cash it in. He encounters a band of Nazi soldiers, led by the savage Bruno (Hennie, Headhunters), who attempt to relieve him of his newfound treasure. They don’t know it yet, but they’ve just f***ed with the wrong Finn!
You see, Korpi isn’t just some random crazy old guy, he’s….. well, something else. It turns out he has a history of violence. He’s a former Special Forces soldier who purportedly took out 300 Russians during the Winter War. His superiors, realizing they couldn’t control him, turned him loose to kill with extreme prejudice. He became the stuff of legend, commonly referred to as “The Immortal” (i.e. he’s unkillable). Korpi lives up to his reputation much to the bloody dismay of Bruno and his men, a slimy bunch travelling the war-ravaged landscape with a truckload of kidnapped young women. They’re not along to make them tea, I’ll tell you that.
Running a lean, mean 91 minutes and made on a relatively low budget of $6.6M, Sisu is FREAKING AWESOME! Helander deserves a lot of credit for delivering an exciting thrill ride of an action picture at a reasonable price. Who says you can’t make a great action flick for under $100M? I love everything about it from how it’s divided into chapters (e.g. “Chapter One: The Gold”, “Chapter Three: The Minefield”) to the brooding cinematography by Kjell Lagerroos (Memory of Water) who shows us a country turned into an ugly, brutal, desolate hellscape by the Nazis’ “scorched earth” tactics. It’s grim alright, but that doesn’t make Sisu any less fun. I can’t knock a movie that shows a band of angry women slo-mo walking through a curtain of smoke, machine guns in hand and ready to kick some ass.
Be warned, Sisu is insanely violent and gory. Not that it’s a bad thing. I LOVE watching Nazis die bloody horrible deaths. Who doesn’t? Highlights include the knife to the skull (the first kill), a head being smashed to a pulp with a metal helmet and soldiers getting blown to pieces by landmines, shot full of holes with machine guns and crushed underneath tanks. The topper has to be when Korpi slices a few throats while hiding underwater so he can use the escaping air bubbles to breathe. SPOILER ALERT! The little dog makes it to the end, the horse doesn’t.
Did I mention that Sisu is also very OTT? It is and then some. It’s one thing to be tenacious and resolute in one’s mission. It’s quite another to cut your way through the floor of an airplane from the outside while hanging from it. This is some Mission: Impossible-type s***! The only difference is this guy is way cooler and way more bad ass than Tom Cruise. Hell, he gives Rambo a run for his money. He even cauterizes and sews his own wounds.
In the role of Korpi, Tommila embodies all the best qualities of Clint’s Man with No Name, Rambo and Mad Max. Like these laconic old school action heroes, his actions speak louder than words. Not that he has all that much to say. He’s not big on dialogue and neither is anyone else in Sisu for that matter. Not a lot needs to be said. You can tell a lot about the hero by the way he carries himself. Tommila absolutely crushes it. Hennie is also very good as the main villain. He adds dimension to his character by depicting him not as a random Nazi bad guy, but as an officer desperate to avoid the consequences for his war crimes now that the conflict is coming to an end. I’d also like to give a shout-out to Mimosa Willamo (Memory of Water) as the leader of the female prisoners. Her smirk as she prepares a couple of Nazi soldiers for their deadly fate at the hands of “The Immortal” is priceless.
Although some will invariably look for deeper meaning in Sisu, claim it’s making a statement about nationalism and colonialism, I don’t want to go there. I prefer to think of it as a cool blood-soaked neo-exploitation film that will hopefully pave the way for a resurgence of the genre. I can see it becoming a new favorite of Quentin Tarantino. He loves this kind of s*** and so do I!
