{"id":6570,"date":"2024-10-25T12:10:18","date_gmt":"2024-10-25T16:10:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=6570"},"modified":"2024-10-25T12:10:18","modified_gmt":"2024-10-25T16:10:18","slug":"sisu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/10\/25\/sisu\/","title":{"rendered":"Sisu"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Sisu <\/strong>(2023)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Lionsgate\/Action\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 91 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (strong bloody violence, gore and 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: Kjell Lagerroos\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: April 28, 2023 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie, Jack Doolan, Mimosa Willamo, Onni Tommila.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $7.3M (US)\/$14.3M (World)<\/p>\n

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

\u00a0Exploitation movies, bring \u2018em back! I\u2019ve 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<\/strong>, 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\u2019s more apt to ram a knife into an enemy\u2019s 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 \u201cSisu\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Set 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\u2019t 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\u2019t know it yet, but they\u2019ve just f***ed with the wrong Finn!<\/p>\n

\u00a0You see, Korpi isn\u2019t just some random crazy old guy, he\u2019s….. well, something else. It turns out he has a history of violence. He\u2019s a former Special Forces soldier who purportedly took out 300 Russians during the Winter War. His superiors, realizing they couldn\u2019t control him, turned him loose to kill with extreme prejudice. He became the stuff of legend, commonly referred to as \u201cThe Immortal\u201d (i.e. he\u2019s 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\u2019re not along to make them tea, I\u2019ll tell you that.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Running a lean, mean 91 minutes and made on a relatively low budget of $6.6M, Sisu<\/strong> 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\u2019t make a great action flick for under $100M? I love everything about it from how it\u2019s divided into chapters (e.g. \u201cChapter One: The Gold\u201d, \u201cChapter Three: The Minefield\u201d) 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\u2019 \u201cscorched earth\u201d tactics. It\u2019s grim alright, but that doesn\u2019t make Sisu<\/strong> any less fun. I can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Be warned, Sisu<\/strong> is insanely violent and gory. Not that it\u2019s a bad thing. I LOVE watching Nazis die bloody horrible deaths. Who doesn\u2019t? 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! <\/strong>The little dog makes it to the end, the horse doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Did I mention that Sisu<\/strong> is also very OTT? It is and then some. It\u2019s one thing to be tenacious and resolute in one\u2019s mission. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0In the role of Korpi, Tommila embodies all the best qualities of Clint\u2019s 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\u2019s not big on dialogue and neither is anyone else in Sisu<\/strong> 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\u2019d 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 \u201cThe Immortal\u201d is priceless.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Although some will invariably look for deeper meaning in Sisu<\/strong>, claim it\u2019s making a statement about nationalism and colonialism, I don\u2019t 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!\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sisu (2023)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Lionsgate\/Action\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 91 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (strong bloody violence, gore and 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: Kjell Lagerroos\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: April 28, 2023 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie, Jack Doolan, Mimosa Willamo, Onni Tommila.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $7.3M (US)\/$14.3M (World) Rating: **** \u00a0Exploitation movies, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7425,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-kick-ass-actioners","category-scary-gory-wild-i-love-it"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Sisu-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6570","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=6570"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7427,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6570\/revisions\/7427"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}