TL;DR: Sisu: Road to Revenge takes everything great about the original — the old-school stunt work, the mythic heroism, the brutal simplicity — and dials it up with a more emotional core and a villain worthy of the legend. It’s punchy, gorgeous, practical-effects heaven that proves the Sisu formula still absolutely slaps.
Sisu: Road to Revenge
There’s a certain joy in watching a filmmaker double down on the exact brand of cinematic chaos that made their first movie a cult smash. When the original Sisu dropped in 2022, it felt like someone had scraped the best parts of a dozen Saturday-night VHS action flicks, run them through a Mad Max: Fury Road blender, and said: what if we let a taciturn Finnish prospector single-handedly collapse an entire Nazi convoy? That film ruled because it embraced simplicity like a religion. Sisu: Road to Revenge, the brand-new sequel, keeps that faith — but also dares to stretch the mythos without slowing its roll.
As a lifelong connoisseur of action movies where the hero has a thousand-yard stare and a body count that requires its own Excel spreadsheet, I couldn’t help but grin when Aatami Korpi (played with granite-faced perfection by Jorma Tommila) trudged back onto my screen. I didn’t think I needed more Sisu in my life. Turns out I absolutely did. Road to Revenge is leaner, meaner, and somehow even more confident in its old-school brutality — like Helander opened the window, tossed out anything that smelled like plot handholding, and kept only the cinematic napalm.
The plot this time is still streamlined to a single artery, but the blood running through it is darker. Aatami has a tragic backstory now. I won’t spoil specifics, but let’s just say it locks in the emotional stakes without ever bogging the movie down. When your protagonist dismantles his family house beam by beam — yes, literally brute-force deconstructing his past — it hits like an emotional gut punch disguised as carpentry. And those beams, by the way, become a multi-purpose weapon/tool/holy relic that keeps reappearing like a Chekhov’s 2×4 on steroids. This is the kind of mythic storytelling that feels carved into the side of a Nordic mountain.
Enter the new big bad: Igor Draganov, the Red Army butcher himself. Stephen Lang plays him with the same wiry malice he brought to Avatar, but here he’s unleashed — a villain so theatrically ruthless he feels like he wandered out of a Frank Miller panel. Watching Draganov get sprung from prison is the sort of sequence that makes you lean forward involuntarily, because you know a monster just got let off the leash. And from the moment Aatami and Draganov’s paths converge on those icy backroads of Soviet-occupied Finland, the movie turns into a beautifully choreographed death ballet.
Here’s the thing: Helander refuses to waste time. There’s no padding, no filler, no meditative midpoint where someone contemplates the meaning of war while staring into a fire. Instead, the film bolts from moment to moment like a wolf sprinting through fresh snow. That’s the genius of Sisu as a franchise: narrative simplicity becomes a canvas for outrageous, inventive action sequences. And Road to Revenge delivers set pieces that feel ripped from the fever dreams of someone who grew up smashing toy soldiers together while chugging cold juice boxes.
Take the early scene in which Aatami uses one of those wooden beams to bring down a jet fighter. I mean, sure. Physics is technically a thing. But the film operates under a different set of rules I like to call Helander’s Law: if it looks cool and you can do it practically, it’s legal. The result is a movie packed with baddie-splattering that feels tactile—grainy, heavy, splintering, wet. There’s minimal CGI here, and your eyeballs notice. I could practically smell the motor oil and cordite.
One of the quiet joys of the Sisu series is how it worships the Finnish landscape. Helander shoots his homeland with the affection of someone who grew up barefoot in those very fields, imagining war stories under the pine canopy. The sun-dappled forests and rugged terrain aren’t just pretty backdrops; they’re characters in the film, as integral to the story as Aatami’s knives or Draganov’s sneer. There’s a childlike giddiness to the way Helander stages fights and explosions among the trees, the rivers, the old farmhouses. Watching the movie, I had flashbacks to being the kid who stayed out way past sunset, building imaginary forts and staging battles until the real world called me back inside. Sisu: Road to Revenge taps directly into that primal, imaginative part of the brain.
Of course, the movie isn’t operating entirely in the realm of grit and machismo. It knows it’s pulpy. It knows it’s cartoonish. There’s even a mousetrap gag that pops in out of nowhere like it wandered in from a different film. But this comic-book tone is exactly what sets Road to Revenge apart from modern blockbuster action cinema, which often feels obligated to justify every explosion with three paragraphs of lore. Sisu does the opposite: it holds just tightly enough to emotional reality to anchor you, then sprints headfirst into deliciously over-the-top set pieces. It’s like Helander watched every CGI climax of the last decade and said: what if we just didn’t?
Tommila, meanwhile, carries the movie on his face — and what a face it is. Weather-beaten, bloody, silent, and somehow communicating entire emotional arcs with micro-expressions, he remains one of the most compelling action leads of the 2020s. Every grimace tells a story; every flicker in his eyes suggests he’s doing math equations about how to turn the nearest object — tree, tire, abandoned farm implement — into a weapon. He’s the kind of character who could kill a tank with a rope, and I would believe it because the film’s internal logic is so ruthlessly consistent.
The grace note running through the movie is how those wooden beams keep reappearing in unexpected ways. They’re a metaphor for Aatami himself: durable, multipurpose, quietly essential. First they represent loss, then protection, then transformation. By the final act, the symbolism clicks into something surprisingly poetic, in the way only an action movie that’s allergic to monologues can be poetic.
Let me emphasize: Sisu: Road to Revenge is the kind of sequel that understands the assignment. Raise the stakes. Expand the world. Don’t overthink it. Punch harder. Cut faster. And trust your audience to follow the silent, brutal rhythm. Helander is evolving as a filmmaker without abandoning the primal cinematic joy that made the first film a cult hit. This movie is going to annihilate in midnight screenings and earn cheers in any city that’s endured real-life aggression from neighboring bullies. You can practically hear the applause from Kyiv already.
With Road to Revenge, the Sisu franchise cements itself as a modern action classic — not because it’s loud or big, but because it understands what so many other blockbusters forget: simplicity can be transcendent when executed with ruthless clarity and a wicked gleam in the eye.
