Ed. note: This review comes from the world premiere of Sisu: Road to Revenge at Fantastic Fest 2025. The movie will be released in November.
Many years ago, a friend of mine who was addicted to The Wire had a favorite icebreaker question. In a season 2 episode of the show, crime legend Omar (Michael K. Williams) baits a trap for conniving addict and police snitch Bubbles (Andre Royo) by leaving a radiator out in the open, knowing Bubs will be unable to resist a sellable piece of scrap metal. My friend used to ask people “What would your enemies use to bait the perfect trap for you?” Watching Sisu: Road to Revenge, Jalmari Helander’s sequel to his stripped-down 2022 revenge movie Sisu, took me straight back to that question, because the movie feels like genre-fan bait in its purest, most uncut form. Put a screen showing Road to Revenge out in the open, and you could trap more action-movie addicts than you’d know what to do with.
Like the original Sisu, Road to Revenge is light on dialogue and heavy on righteous, well-justified bloodshed. Sisu, set in 1944, has a grizzled Finnish army veteran, Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila, the writer-director’s brother-in-law) carving his way through scores of Nazis after they steal the bags of gold nuggets he’s painstakingly mined. Road to Revenge finds Aatami in 1946, returning to his rustic home in a part of Finland that’s been ceded to the USSR. He painstakingly disassembles his house and attempts to move the materials across the new border to unoccupied Finland, but hits resistance from brutal Red Army officer Igor Draganov (genre stalwart and recurrent Avatar movie baddie Stephen Lang), who’s been ordered to track down and kill the terrifying figure who carved up the Red Army back in the three-month Winter War.
Draganov personally oversaw the vicious purge of Finnish locals that killed Aatami’s wife and children, which gives Aatami a personal reason to fight back. But that extra touch hardly seems necessary; Road to Revenge already has everything it needs. There’s a simple man with a sentimental, non-simple goal. We know he’s a good guy, mostly because he has a pet dog and a worn, beloved picture of himself with his dead family, and also because some very bad men fear and hate him. He wants to go home, but home no longer exists for him, so he has to fix that.
The very bad men come after Aatami in video-game-esque escalating waves, naturally dividing the movie into six chapters where he fights them off, taking increasingly excruciating damage along the way to the inevitable boss fight. Draganov delivers speeches. Aatami doesn’t talk at all. A great many things blow up in surprising, thrilling fashion.
There’s a kind of straight-faced ridiculousness to a lot of Road to Revenge. Some of it comes in the form of the improbably extensive damage Aatami takes en route without capitulating. (“Sisu,” we’re told in expository text at the beginning of both movies, is an untranslatable Finnish ideal, “a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination.”) Some of it’s in the resourceful but unlikely means he uses to destroy the men hunting him down. He has a truck and his fists. They have guns, explosives, motorbikes, body armor, planes full of bombs, and more.
And on top of all that, Aatami’s goal of attempting to move a house across miles of occupied territory is quixotic and a bit ludicrous. Preventing the Soviets from getting their hands on a single thing that matters to him is clearly important to Aatami, but the image of him trying to protect a creaky old truck full of lumber never stops being a bit silly. Even Lang’s mustache-twiddling performance feels campy.
But the plot’s absolute minimalism gives Sisu: Road to Revenge a power that reaches back to movies like the first John Wick, to John Rambo in First Blood (an open inspiration for Helander, who’s now contracted to direct a Rambo prequel), and to classics like Point Blank before them. “I like to keep things as simple as possible,” Helander told Polygon in an interview at Fantastic Fest in Austin, where the film had its lively world-premiere screening in front of a crowd of enthusiastically whooping genre fans.
As in Sisu, there’s no nuanced character work here, no shades of gray or thoughtful explorations of trauma or conflicted metaphors about modern society. There’s a hero and a bunch of mostly anonymous villains, representing humanity’s most irrationally oppressive and evil side. The villains die in cathartic, often unlikely, but always satisfying ways. Nothing here is meant to linger past the adrenaline spike when a speeding motorcycle gets a grenade shoved into its wheel, pops improbably upward into mid-air, and explodes. This isn’t a movie to take home with you and discuss afterward. It’s a gritty, grimy, often grotesque version of a sugar-rush high.
That also means it’s a movie only meant for certain audiences. Viewers more interested in character development than spectacle will be bored; viewers who prefer the realism of well-trained bodies in complicated, choreographed feats of athleticism will be disappointed. That’s fine. Sisu: Road to Revenge isn’t bait for their particular, personal traps. This movie does one thing, and does it well, via methods that escalate to nearly cartoonish proportions. And it’s clear in absolutely every grim, gory, gutting-it-out scene that Helander and Tommila know exactly who they’re making this movie for.
Sisu: Road to Revenge will be released in theaters on Nov. 21
