Sisu: Road to Revenge (2025) Screen Gems/Action RT: 88 minutes Rated R (strong bloody violence, gore, language) Director: Jalmari Helander Screenplay: Jalmari Helander Music: Juri Seppa and Tuomas Wainola Cinematography: Mika Orasmaa Release date: November 21, 2025 (US) Cast: Jorma Tommila, Stephen Lang, Richard Brake.
Rating: ****
I’m just going to go ahead and drop a big spoiler about Sisu: Road to Revenge. The dog does NOT die. He makes it to the end. That, I’m sure, should come as a relief to all the dog lovers out there. Now you can see it with a free mind.
I’m a big fan of the original Sisu. It was my favorite movie of 2023. I love how Finnish filmmaker Jalmari Helander (Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale) leans right into the insanity of it all. I’m pleased to report the writer-director does the same with the sequel Sisu: Road to Revenge. It’s just as gloriously OTT as its predecessor. How else would you describe a film where the hero uses a warhead missile to [REDACTED] a train? It’s a wild ride!
Like the first movie, Sisu: Road to Revenge doesn’t anything deep or important to say. It’s not some grand statement on colonialism. The closest it comes to anything like that is the opening narration explaining how the Soviet Union took over part of Finland after WWII. It provides context for what happens during the next 87 minutes.
It’s 1946 and the war is over. Aatami “The Immortal” Korpi (Tommila, Rare Exports) wants to rebuild his life, both literally and figuratively. He crosses the border to Soviet-occupied Finland to dismantle the house he once lived in with wife and children who were murdered during the war. He loads the planks of wood onto a big lumbering truck with the intention of rebuilding it in a safe place. First, he has to get there. That’s where he runs into a problem.
Word of Korpi’s return reaches the KGB. An officer (Brake, Barbarian) sends Red Army officer Igor Draganov (Lang, Avatar 1 & 2) to kill him. It makes sense since he’s the one who created The Immortal in the first place. He’s the one who killed his wife and sons by chopping them to pieces with a shovel.
Sisu: Road to Revenge is basically one long chase sequence similar to Mad Max 2 [aka The Road Warrior]. Draganov goes after Korpi with everything he’s got. Soviet baddies come after him in trucks, on motorcycles and in planes. They shoot at him, set his truck on fire and drop bombs on him. Nothing works. And that’s just the first half of the movie. The rest of it takes place on a moving train filled with Russian soldiers and KGB officers. Korpi turns it into a mobile slaughterhouse. Would you expect any less from The Immortal?
Sisu: Road to Revenge contains something I’m seeing less and less of in this age of CGI, a cool “YEAH, RIGHT!” scene. This one’s a doozy. It involves a tank. The hero makes it do something it shouldn’t be able to do. I won’t say what, but it defies all logic and laws of science. It had the audience going “Whoa!” and “Holy s***!
If you thought Jorma Tommila was big on dialogue in the first Sisu (he spoke two lines in the entire picture), he outdoes himself in Sisu: Road to Revenge. He doesn’t speak a single word. He lets his actions and facial expressions do all the talking. Early on, you can read the grief all over his face when he finds a picture of him with his family in happier times. You can see grief mixed with anger when Draganov describes in detail what he did to his family. When he goes to work on the enemy army, the look of grit and determination as he fights his way through physical and mental pain cuts deeper than any knife or sharp instrument.
Lang always makes a great villain. He does so again here as the primary antagonist. He positively oozes ice-cold evil from every pore, not even flinching when the guy sitting in the passenger seat is shot through the head. What’s even cooler is how clueless he is about his sealed fate. He thinks he’s going to walk away, but everybody watching knows he’s going to get what’s coming to him and more. In the back of my mind, I hear Sylvester Stallone shouting “YOU’RE F***ING DEAD!!!” at him.
Sisu: Road to Revenge is neo-exploitation at its best. It’s a solid B-movie with zero A-list aspirations. Helander unapologetically goes OTT with lots of insanely bloody violence. There’s one scene where the hero uses the top half of a body to escape from a locked and guarded train car. People are shot, stabbed, beaten, run over and blown to bits. One guy gets impaled by a pick axe thrown by Korpi. Another gets decapitated slowly. This movie is chin-deep in blood.
We’re coming up on Oscar season, the time of year when studios start rolling out their prestige films, what most people call Oscar bait. I can’t speak to how they’ll be or even if they’ll earn a spot on my Top 10 of 2025 list. I can say that Sisu: Road to Revenge is definitely on it. It’s not what film scholars would consider fine art cinema, but it is what movie lovers like me think is a great movie. Helander keeps it tight and fast cramming a lot of action into 88 minutes. He wisely avoids padding out the run time with a bunch of exposition. He gets right down to business and sticks with it until the end. He accomplishes everything he sets out to do. That, in my book, is a great big win.
