Finland’s brutal John Wick descendant Sisu promises too much

It’s 1944. The Nazis are being driven out of Finland, and they’re using scorched-earth tactics, burning everything and everyone to the ground as they leave the country. They’ve destroyed villages and kidnapped young women, and now they’re looking for more targets to vent their anger on after their humiliating defeat.

Enter Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), a grizzled, legendary Finnish veteran of the winter war with the Soviets. He’s trying to dig for gold and he doesn’t want much to do with the current conflict. When a Nazi battalion of tanks and vehicles passes him in the field, he doesn’t pay much attention to it. But when a small band of Nazis try to steal his gold and kill him, Aatami breaks out his dormant array of assassination skills and goes to work, dispatching the soldiers with relentless, brutal abandon.

That’s the premise of Sisu, the new English-language Finnish movie that aims to win the hearts of John Wick fans around the world with its own version of the vengeful “retired killer retires” action. “Sisu” is an untranslatable Finnish term, as the opening text explains: “It means a rock-hard form of courage and unimaginable determination. Sisu manifests itself when all hope is lost.” In this case, Sisu manifests through Aatami, a silent, intense man who only speaks in the last lines of the film. Aatami travels through the beautiful scenery of Lapland, evoking a sense of the vastness of the Finnish countryside Sisuwith the emptiness and desolation enhanced by images of burnt down villages.

There is a significant tonal clash Sisu back from the kind of fun midnight action merciless advertisement campaign promises. Tommila’s grounded, quiet performance as Aatami, together with the rather conventional way director Jalmari Helander, cinematographer Kjell Lagerroos and editor Juho Virolainen frame the action, suggest a more serious revenge thriller. At the same time, the booming music, cheesy chapter titles (“The Legend”, “The Nazis”, “Kill ‘Em All”) and some ridiculously silly action beats (like Aatami piggybacking on the bottom of a plane by sticking his would-be pickaxe into it as it takes off) put it more firmly in the realm of ridiculously fun promotional fares.

Aksel Hennie’s menacing performance as the leading Nazi is suitably repulsive – I anxiously awaited his explosive death from start to finish. I wish he had a mustache to twirl, because that would fit perfectly with the tone he’s going for, one that Helander only partially commits to in Sisu. Hennie has long excelled at playing characters with a sinister edge beneath the surface (Headhunters, The journey), and here he can just pull out all the stops like a menacing Nazi. Sisu would have benefited greatly from Helander and co. bringing a similar tone to the rest of the film.

The action sequences are brutal and show many, many, many different ways to kill Nazis. There’s something just about seeing dozens of them die in such visceral ways. The opening action of the movie is interrupted by a very satisfying knife through the skull. Many heads and bodies explode. And at one point, Aatami slits a man’s throat underwater so that he can suck his victim’s oxygen from his perforated trachea.

But Helander’s camera work and veteran stuntman Ouli Kitti’s fight choreography are surprisingly understated in an action film whose creatives were clearly delighted to find as many ways to kill people as possible. This applies Sisu back from a gorefest-like cult action Project Wolf Hunt – in that damn movie, director Hong-sun Kim infamously used 2.5 tons of fake blood and, crucially, kept a light-hearted B-movie tone throughout the splatterfest – or something like the Finnish cult hit “Nazis in space” Iron airwhich fully embraced its place as an overnight promotional prize.

Sisu‘s creators were clearly heavily inspired by the John Wick films, especially in the myth-making surrounding its hero. People speak in hushed tones of Aatami – a Nazi officer explains that Russian soldiers called the Finnish fighter “The Immortal” for his exploits during the Winter War. It feels essentially the same as the scene from the original John Wick when Michael Nyqvist tells Dean Winters and Alfie Allen the story of the Baba Yaga, but without the nascent sense of futility (and gleefully over-the-top subtitles) that made that scene so effective and darkly humorous.

Sisu is aimed at an English-speaking audience and opens with an explanatory voice-over narration in English that sets the tone for those who may not be familiar with the conflict between Finland and Nazi Germany. Oddly enough, even the Nazis speak to each other in English. No Finnish is spoken until the end of the film, which removes some possibilities for a true Finnish alternate history/revenge story. These and other choices leave Sisu getting stuck between two notes without fully committing to either one, promising more than it ultimately delivers.

Sisu now playing in theaters.