Finnish John Wick is back (he even has a dog), and this time he’s swapping out Nazis for the Soviet army that murdered his family. Look — if you’ve seen the first Sisu, you know what to expect in Sisu: Road to Revenge. But, this time, the film has been pared down. Not that the first film, which was essentially a play on Clint Eastwood’s The Man With No Name, had much going for it in the way of plot. But the sequel even takes away the allure of gold, reducing its structure to the bloodiest, dumbest nuts and bolts. And that’s not a bad thing at all, especially not when the kills are as fun as this.
Sisu: Road to Revenge Is The Platonic Ideal of a Popcorn Movie
Jelmari Helander’s sequel begins a couple of years after the first, in 1946, as the Finnish border accedes ground to the Soviet Union as a side effect of the end of World War II. Aatami (Jorma Tommila) is one of 420,000 Finns forcibly displaced from Karelia; but that won’t stop the Man Who Refuses To Die from crossing over the border to dismantle the foundation of his slain family’s home so that he can bring it into Finland to start life anew. I guess the Legend is sentimental.
Word spreads fast amongst the Soviet military personnel that Aatami has returned, and a KGB officer (Richard Brake, bad Russian accent) immediately sends for the sociopath who killed Aatami’s family, Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang, even worse accent, but charmingly so) to finish the job. Draganov has been imprisoned in one of Siberia’s notorious institutions for reasons as yet unknown, but suffice it to say this is one bad dude that delights in chopping up children with shovels. Whatever the case, the Russians are mad at the revenge Aatami once enacted to the tune of 300 kills, and so now they want their revenge back. So it’s a revenge-off. Which revenge will revenge even revenge-ier? The revenge of one old man who lost his family, or the revenge of another old man who is in prison, or the revenge of a third old man who lost 300 men?
After a haircut and a shave, Draganov immediately goes on the hunt, while Aatami attempts to cross back into Finland. From here, the film takes a similar shape to Mad Max: Fury Road, as our mostly mute hero faces an escalating series of bad guys and death traps. As before, Helander packs the film with as many physics-defying squibs as he can. Split into six chapters (plus a surprisingly sweet epilogue), Road to Revenge strikes a fine balance between absurdity and earnestness. There is no shortage of entertaining kills: death by molotov cocktail, decapitation by rope pulley, axe throws through the mouth. In one scene, Aatami catapults a tank over a booby-trapped barricade with himself in it. Twice, Aatami catches a bullet without realizing it, once to his face.
Considering that this sequel doesn’t give its characters any chance at remuneration, it instead takes up an even more apocalyptic feeling than the first. Yet for all of its barenness, it doesn’t feel remotely bleak, partly because the escalation of Aatami’s survivalism is so absurd it can only elicit incredulous laughter. And, even more than the first, Helander’s ability to effectively stage a brutal action sequence is aces. The final act, which takes place entirely within several cabins of a fast-moving train, is amongst the genre’s most electrifying, taut sequences. In some ways, the film’s hollowness allows it to circle back upon itself and become a pure expression of adrenaline. It may not be as elegant as John Wick or as politically charged as Mad Max, but Sisu white-knuckles us there just the same.
Sisu: Road to Revenge
7/10
- Release Date
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November 21, 2025
- Runtime
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89 minutes
- Director
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Jalmari Helander
- Writers
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Jalmari Helander
- Producers
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Petri Jokiranta, Mike Goodridge