{"id":13480,"date":"2025-11-19T12:17:34","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T17:17:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=13480"},"modified":"2025-12-23T17:45:48","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T22:45:48","slug":"sisu-road-to-revenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2025\/11\/19\/sisu-road-to-revenge\/","title":{"rendered":"Sisu: Road to Revenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Sisu: Road to Revenge<\/strong> (2025)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screen Gems\/Action\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 88 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (strong bloody violence, gore, language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Jalmari Helander\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Jalmari Helander\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Juri Seppa and Tuomas Wainola\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Mika Orasmaa\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Release date: November 21, 2025 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Jorma Tommila, Stephen Lang, Richard Brake.<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: ****<\/p>\n

\u00a0I\u2019m just going to go ahead and drop a big spoiler about Sisu: Road to Revenge<\/strong>. The dog does NOT die. He makes it to the end. That, I\u2019m sure, should come as a relief to all the dog lovers out there. Now you can see it with a free mind.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I\u2019m 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\u2019m pleased to report the writer-director does the same with the sequel Sisu: Road to Revenge<\/strong>. It\u2019s just as gloriously OTT as its predecessor. How else would you describe a film where the hero uses a warhead missile to [REDACTED<\/strong>] a train? It\u2019s a wild ride!<\/p>\n

\u00a0Like the first movie, Sisu: Road to Revenge<\/strong> doesn\u2019t anything deep or important to say. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0It\u2019s 1946 and the war is over. Aatami \u201cThe Immortal\u201d 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\u2019s where he runs into a problem.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Word of Korpi\u2019s 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\u2019s the one who created The Immortal in the first place. He\u2019s the one who killed his wife and sons by chopping them to pieces with a shovel.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Sisu: Road to Revenge<\/strong> is basically one long chase sequence similar to Mad Max 2 [aka The Road Warrior]. Draganov goes after Korpi with everything he\u2019s 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\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

\u00a0Sisu: Road to Revenge <\/strong>contains something I\u2019m seeing less and less of in this age of CGI, a cool \u201cYEAH, RIGHT!\u201d scene. This one\u2019s a doozy. It involves a tank. The hero makes it do something it shouldn\u2019t be able to do. I won\u2019t say what, but it defies all logic and laws of science. It had the audience going \u201cWhoa!\u201d and \u201cHoly s***!<\/p>\n

\u00a0If 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<\/strong>. He doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Lang 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\u2019s even cooler is how clueless he is about his sealed fate. He thinks he\u2019s going to walk away, but everybody watching knows he\u2019s going to get what\u2019s coming to him and more. In the back of my mind, I hear Sylvester Stallone shouting \u201cYOU\u2019RE F***ING DEAD!!!\u201d at him.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Sisu: Road to Revenge<\/strong> is neo-exploitation at its best. It\u2019s a solid B-movie with zero A-list aspirations. Helander unapologetically goes OTT with lots of insanely bloody violence. There\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0We\u2019re 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\u2019t speak to how they\u2019ll be or even if they\u2019ll earn a spot on my Top 10 of 2025 list. I can say that Sisu: Road to Revenge<\/strong> is definitely on it. It\u2019s 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.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sisu: Road to Revenge (2025)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screen Gems\/Action\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 88 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (strong bloody violence, gore, language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Jalmari Helander\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Jalmari Helander\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Juri Seppa and Tuomas Wainola\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Mika Orasmaa\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Release date: November 21, 2025 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Jorma Tommila, Stephen Lang, Richard Brake. Rating: **** \u00a0I\u2019m just going to go ahead and drop […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13485,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-adventure","category-kick-ass-actioners"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Sisu-2-POSTER.jpg?fit=620%2C918&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13480"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13489,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13480\/revisions\/13489"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}