Mark Reviews Movies: ATTACK ON FINLAND

Attack on Finland, Samuel Goldwyn Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 30, 2022

The absence of any personal or political introspection is obvious from the start of Attack on Finland. In an opening sequence, a European Joint Police Operations mission goes wrong, when one of a pair of agents, trying to copy data from the computer of a Russian oligarch in his home, shoots and kills a teenage boy who wasn't supposed to be there. Any institutional or individual regret about the fatal mistake is resolved a few scenes later. Actually, the deadly error is basically forgotten, until it becomes a vital part of the overly convoluted plot being executed by a group of overly shadowy villains.

In its rush to dive into the suspense and action that results of that evil plan, director Aku Louhimies' movie rather unintentionally turns its protagonists into some cold-hearted, remorseless, and generally uncaring figures. That, one imagines, is meant to be part of the job of working in national and international intelligence services, whose agents don't have the time or luxury to question orders or over-think the consequences of their actions. Within the context of this story, though, that apparent lack of conscience puts up an unfortunate wall between the movie's intentions and our response to them.

That none of the characters here even has much of a personality to compensate for their workman-like apathy means that we can't even enjoy their adventures on a level of escapism. They come across as dead on the inside and dull on the outside. That's a terrible combination for protagonists in a story as politically complicated as this one and as the drivers of a plot as over-the-top as Jari Olavi Rantala's screenplay quickly becomes.

The main characters are Max Tanner (Jasper Pääkkönen), an agent for the Finish intelligence service SUPO, and Sylvia Madsen (Nanna Blondell), his Swedish counterpart. One imagines the specifics of how these two local intelligence agents are recruited for and become part of such pan-European operations, led by the international police force's head Marie Leclair (Cathy Bealton), are better known in those countries, since any explanation is bypassed by Rantala's screenplay (based on both a novel by Ikka Remes and a previous, discarded screenplay—which would be a foreboding sign, if the opening credits had revealed that fact—written by Antti Jokinen and Mika Karttunen).

Max and Sylvia do retrieve the information from the laptop, and Sylvia does kill the teenager, who believes a couple of masked thieves have broken into his family's home. Leclair lets the local police speculation that it was a home invasion run, and both bachelor Max and married Sylvia, whose romantic affair on the sides is too dispassionate and constipated for it to convincingly serve as the only mark of the characters' capacity for emotions, go back to their on-the-books jobs in their respective home countries.

From here, those two basically exist as pawns becoming caught up in and, soon enough, attempting to thwart a vast international plot with an ever-increasing number of conspirators involved. The main one pulling the strings is Anya (Nika Savolainen), a Russian spy, mercenary, or private contractor of nefarious schemes and deeds.

She enlists Vasa Jankovic (Sverrir Gudnason), the only surviving son of his Serbian war criminal father (played by Miodrag Stojanovic), to raid the Finish Presidential Palace during the country's Independence Day celebrations, take some VIPs hostage, and demand the release of his father. Max is called in as a negotiator, and Sylvia is already inside the palace, ostensibly serving as the bodyguard for a French general (played by Zijad Gracic) who champions the idea of the Russia-bordering Finland to become a part of NATO. The vast web of conflicting political interests, military history, government-organized disinformation campaigns, and international treaties would probably be fascinating, if either Rantala or Louhimies took even a moment's break from expanding the plot and providing standoffs, chases, and shootouts to consider them.

Instead, the plot unfolds with predictability, although Louhimies' staging of the hostage crisis and the behind-the-scenes arguments of how to solve it does generate some tension (Max, obviously, is the only one who knows all the correct answers, unlike his superiors). An act that feels like bad-taste exploitation—even to someone outside of Finland—sends the plot in a completely different but equally formulaic direction, with a behind-enemy-lines covert/revenge mission.

The third act of Attack on Finland gives us yet another villain, answers a couple of questions, has Max offering a particularly awful one-liner (You'll know it, for sure), and leaves so many threads hanging that the existence of this conspiracy comes across as a prelude to a sequel. That might explain why the plot is so impenetrable, but it doesn't account for the movie's unearned—or completely accidental—cynicism and its boring, blank-slate heroes.

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