Heroes slaying authoritarian villains is one of cinema’s most time-honored traditions, and it’s continued by Sisu: Road to Revenge (November 21, in theaters), in which Jorma Tommila’s unkillable Finnish commando faces off against the sadistic Soviets who murdered his family.
Trading Third Reich scoundrels for Red Army savages, Jalmari Helander’s sequel to his under-the-radar 2021 hit is another John Wick-by-way-of-Mad Max: Fury Road bloodbath featuring more severed heads and exploded bodies than just about any other 2025 release. Grindhousers don’t come much funnier, crazier, and more grindhouse-y than this.
Having massacred a horde of Nazis who dared to try to steal his gold at the conclusion of World War II, Aatami Korpi (Tommila) enters Karelia—the Finnish areas occupied by the USSR—to return to his home. There, he mourns his dearly departed wife, daughter, and son, whose absence is felt in dirty plates left on the dining room table and unmade beds strewn with children’s dolls.
Korpi is a broken man, and in an effort to heal himself, he methodically dismantles his abode, loading its wooden beams onto his rickety truck alongside those that had previously served as the walls for his pooch’s doghouse. Once again in possession of valuable cargo which he must transport across barren lands populated with enemies, he sets out for Finland, resolved to rebuild his residence across the border while being powered by “sisu,” an untranslatable Finnish word that means “a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination.”
Unfortunately for Korpi, his Soviet-slaughtering ways—which have earned him the nickname “The Immortal”—have not gone unnoticed by Stalin’s military commanders, including a KGB officer (Richard Brake) who releases Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang) from his Siberian prison so he might hunt and kill Korpi.
Draganov is selected for this perilous mission because he’s the man who exterminated Korpi’s clan (with a shovel, no less), and thus he’s viewed by his comrades as responsible for igniting the warrior’s inextinguishable fury. With a Russian accent that’s as thick as a ribeye and chin scruff that would make sandpaper jealous, the gray, mustached Lang makes for a fittingly sadistic baddie. His gleeful cruelty is soon put to the test when he and a squadron of soldiers confront Korpi on an open road in the middle of the bright, sunshiny day.
(Warning: Awesome spoilers follow.)
It will surprise no one to hear that this first encounter does not go Draganov’s way, thereby cluing the Soviet into his adversary’s fearsomeness and forcing him to up his game. Split into chapters like its predecessor, Sisu: Road to Revenge gets the ball rolling slowly, with Korpi wasting minimal energy on these rivals, including Draganov, whom he leaves beside a collection of corpses and a jeep with a flat tire.
Things pick up quickly, however, when Draganov is joined by a second wave of compatriots, who ride motorcycles and are decked out in primitive armor, thereby making them impervious to the rifle rounds that Korpi has acquired from his initial (now dead) opponents. More formidable foes mean more creative violence, and when Korpi dispatches one biker by hanging upside-down out of his truck’s cabin and sticking a grenade in the vehicle’s spokes, thereby causing it to launch into the air and explode, the film kicks into high gear and, for the remainder of its compact 88-minute runtime, never lets up.
Tommila once again plays Korpi as a stoic Man of No Words whose anguish, rage, and willpower are writ large across his lined, bearded and frequently crimson-stained visage, and his wholesale silence—he doesn’t utter a single word for this saga’s entirety—is in keeping with this big-screen series’ grisly cartoonishness.
As with its precursor, Sisu: Road to Revenge is an R-rated Looney Tunes adventure of malice and mayhem, with Helander staging everything with just the right balance of humor and horror. Absurdly over-the-top and designed to elicit amused gasps, it’s a bleak riot, and it peaks with a long-form finale set on a train that features wordless gags fit for a Bugs and Daffy short—provided, of course, that they were psychotic marauders who solved their problems with as much carnage as cunning.
Before that showstopping conclusion, the writer/director ups the ante in wittily thrilling ways. Once Korpi finishes off his motorcyclist challengers, he’s attacked by two fighter planes outfitted with guns and bombs, and the means by which he takes care of the second aircraft—which involves creative use of his truck’s freight—is so loopily improbable that it’s laugh-out-loud funny.
Physics are routinely scoffed at by Sisu: Road to Revenge, as when Korpi straps his home’s timber to a tank and, via ingenious use of dynamite, literally flips the war machine over a Soviet border crossing blockade without suffering any fatal wounds in the process. Korpi is like a rubberier Wick, his exploits outsized and unbelievable.
Nonetheless, Helander maintains just enough gravity to keep things from tipping into parody, primarily by going full-bore into gruesomeness, complete with decapitations, dismemberment, slit throats, blown-off fingers, and other assorted cruelty that lets the proceedings keep one foot in (or at least close to) reality.
Asked to match Tommila scowl for scowl, Lang proves an ideal foil in Sisu: Road to Revenge, and Helander’s script gives him a procession of blunt one-liners that are as goofily grim as the rest of the action.
There’s no subtext to be found in Korpi and Draganov’s conflict, and the film’s upfront text is as standard-issue as they come, putting its protagonist through an episodic one-against-many gauntlet that’s fueled by a burning hunger for vengeance (Korpi) and a desire to handle unfinished business and earn some money (Draganov). The aim is merely gung-ho insanity of a jokey order, and in that regard, this bigger and badder sequel delivers, pushing things to the gooey, gnarly extreme.
A B-movie franchise that cares less about reinventing the genre than milking its outrageous conventions for all they’re worth, Helander’s Sisu films are made for rowdy midnight screenings. Just as Korpi is “the man who refuses to die,” they seem primed to live on as beloved cult classics—and, hopefully, to spawn at least a few more wildly excessive entries.
