When writer/director Jalmari Helander was thinking about a sequel to his 2023 cult fave Sisu, he wanted to ramp up the action antics of the original to the max – and he may well have managed that. “I don’t know how much crazier you can go,” he said.
Flying tanks. Crashing trains. Giant cannons. All that craziness is wrapped up in Sisu: Road to Revenge. After premiering at this year’s Fantastic Fest, the Finnish bare-knuckle action flick smashes into cinemas this week.
The first film centered on Finnish prospector Aatami (Jorma Tommila, Rare Exports), who creatively annihilates a bunch of Nazi invaders during World War II. In the sequel, Helander moves the action to another moment in Finnish history. At different points, the Finns found themselves in conflict with both the German Reich and the Soviet Union, and so in Sisu: Road to Revenge, Aatami finds himself on the wrong side of the border as the Russians occupy the former Finnish territories of Karelia. Aatami’s new quest is to dismantle his family home, log by log, and rebuild it in Finland, even if he has to go through the entire Red Army to do it. Helander acknowledged that it was “a big decision to make the second one, and try to be as good or better,” but once he had the idea of Aatami getting his home back to his native soil, “that’s when I knew it was worth it, that the idea was good enough.”
Road to Revenge also gives Aatami a true adversary in Igor Draganov, a merciless Russian warrior who has become hardened by his time in the Siberian gulags and now can regain his freedom if he stops the unstoppable Finn. Initially, Helander was considering a younger actor to match Tommila’s brutality, but the executives at Sony suggested Stephen Lang (Avatar: The Way of Water, Don’t Breathe) for the part, “and when I heard that idea for the first time I immediately knew it was a really, really good idea.”
It’s a very Finnish story even if the production is less Finnish than the first film, which Helander shot in Nuorgam, a remote corner of northern Finland, This time, production moved to the far more accessible forests of Estonia. “We didn’t have the challenge to get the gear into really, really difficult places, but we had different difficulties with all the vehicles.”
After all, Road to Revenge is filled with vehicles, and chases, and stunts, and explosions, and creative deaths, as Helander attempted to outdo his kills from the first film. (His favorite from Sisu? Dropping callous Nazi invader Obersturmführer Bruno Helldorf out of a plane, tied to a bomb.) Fortunately, this was a much bigger production, and “when you get more money, you can start blowing up more things,” said Helander. That extended budget meant that he could create even more elaborate action scenes, including a lengthy sequence in which Aatami fights his way from one end of a train to the other. “I spent a lot of time writing the train sequence, and I really enjoyed shooting it because you can concentrate on doing really cool, small things rather than just being constantly on the move with a lot of vehicles.”
The bleak and isolated setting of the first film was inspired by films like Alien, Jaws, and First Blood where the protagonist is “in the middle of nowhere where there are no police and no rules, and you do what you can to survive.” This time, Helander was much more influenced by Timothy Dalton’s James Bond movies (“there’s some really inventive action going on in those films”) and the hard-hitting adventures of Indiana Jones – sometimes even more than he realized. “Sometimes I think I have a really cool idea, and then I watch one of the Indiana Jones films and go, ‘Ah, OK, it’s not mine.’”
However, he’s not looking to outdo himself on the scale or insanity of his action sequences in any further Sisu films. Right now, Road to Revenge feels like the final trip for Aatami, wrapping up his story in a surprisingly emotional fashion. Helander said, “I really love the last scene of the movie, and it’s really important to me. … It feels like a pretty good ending.”
Sisu: Road to Revenge opens in theatres Nov. 21. See showtimes and review.
