A hero is defined by their nemesis. Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), the implacable and merciless machine of vengeance from Finnish WWII action romp Sisu, finally gets a worthy opponent in Igor Dragonov (Stephen Lang), the monstrous villain of Sisu: Road to Revenge.
Both men express what the Finns call sisu, a culturally specific term defined roughly as a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination – or, as it’s explained in the first film, grim determination to complete a task. Dragonov wants to kill Korpi. Korpi just wants to take the wood that made up his house back across the newly-redrawn border and back to his beloved Finland. For those of you confused about the geopolitics, returning writer/director Jalmari Helander explains the complicated and very Finnish perspective on their Eastern neighbors in a brief preces: however, he also gives some more personal motivations than the fact that the Finns really hate Russia. In the first film, Korpi worked his way through an SS unit just because … well, does anyone need an excuse to obliterate Nazis? In Sisu: Road to Revenge, it’s a little more personal: Dragonov’s unit was the one that killed former commando Korpi’s wife and children, and sent him on a bloody path of vengeance that wiped out an entire battalion – a loss that Moscow pinned on Dragonov. Now, the disgraced officer’s only path out of the salt mines and back into the good graces of the Party leads straight across Korpi’s corpse.
So, two grizzled old men, both alike in creative approaches to mayhem, bound by violence.
But Dragonov isn’t set up as Korpi’s physical equal. After all, he’s spent the last few years in a deep, dark hole in Siberia, paying penance for getting hundreds of Red Army troops killed. What they really share is that, as the Russian describes the Finn, they’re both stubborn motherfuckers. The difference is that Korpi is just a tough guy that loves his family and his nation, the kind of badass that slicks his hair back with his own blood. Dragonov by comparison is an evil butcher of women and children, and quite prepared to see his troops butchered in highly creative fashion by Korpi, just to test him. (That said, at least Dragonov’s honest in his cruelty, and so one circle of Hell above the always perfectly malevolent Richard Brake as the treacherous commander who sends him to fix his mistake.)
Road to Revenge’s relationship to the first film is a little like The Road Warrior’s connection to Mad Max: more of the same, but with a bigger canvas, and a willingness to be ridiculous. Sisu was an incredibly simple film, built around the Nazis realizing how completely screwed they were every time this taciturn maniac beats another to them to death, or blows them up with another purloined explosive device. He’s not invulnerable, merely hard as nails.
Yet the defining trait of both Sisu films is their surprising sense of comedy. This is grand, grotesque slapstick, and there’s a moment at which Dragonov rightly stares at Korpi’s antics like he’s witnessing Wile E. Coyote in action. Since Korpi spends much of the first half of the film having no idea that he’s in the crosshairs of the man that destroyed his life, he’s mostly just trying to get to Finland with his timber intact.
Sisu: Road to Revenge
World Premiere
Wednesday, Sept. 24, 11:10am
Fantastic Fest 2025 runs Sept. 18-25, Passes and info at fantasticfest.com.
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