SISU - Mark Reviews Movies

Sisu, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 27, 2023

There's little to know about the background of the story of Sisu, except that the Nazis are the villains—an obvious given—and they're on their way out of Finland in 1944, adopting a scorched earth policy as they retreat. Even that little bit of exposition hardly matters to writer/director Jalmari Helander's gory action movie, which is primarily about watching Nazis be shot, stabbed, blown up, and otherwise dispatched in ways that are inherently satisfying—because they're Nazis, of course—but that don't amount to much of a satisfying narrative, either.

By narrative, we're talking about a bit more than mere plot here, lest anyone think the main problem with Helander's movie is that it doesn't offer some in-depth understanding of its characters, the specific conflict being fought in the background, or the wider world war of which it is part. None of that is essential to this particular plot, which exists to set a one-man army against a platoon of Nazi soldiers who have orders to destroy everything and everyone in their path. Take that for what it is, because it's all that the filmmaker seems willing to give us.

That's fine, as long as the movie accomplishes that simple task with some flair, gusto, energy, imagination, or any other term one might use to assert that a thing is, well, interesting and/or exciting. Some of Helander's movie certainly is, especially in its early sections, as we're understanding just how straightforward the screenplay actually is and seeing just how over-the-top the director is willing to go in terms of its violence. Once that pattern settles in, though, the movie falls into a routine with only a few flashes of much inspiration in terms of the grisly or the excessive.

The story revolves around a man named Aatami (Jorma Tommila), a man who is vaguely introduced with two characteristics. The first is that he wants to leave his native Finland, after the toll taken by five years of the country's involvement in the broader conflict—fighting against a Soviet Union allied with Germany at first and then aligned with Nazis to fight the Soviets. The second is the implication of the man's connection to the movie's title, an "untranslatable" Finnish word that essentially means determined courage in the face of everything, which is a pretty fine translation that's offered up by some opening text.

Aatami's plan involves panning and mining for gold, hoping to find enough to begin a new life. The extent of the character's dialogue, save for a notable exception exactly when you'd expect it to arrive, amounts to some grunts and a notable, low growl at one point, but Tommila's performance is still a highlight of the movie, if only because his fiery glares, stoic expression, and tough physicality embody the quality suggested by the title in that silence.

Our man finds a vein of gold after some digging and is set for that new life, until he comes across that platoon of Nazis, traveling by way of trucks and a tank, who are ready to kill Aatami, his trusty horse, and his loyal dog. The hero gets the jump on the three soldiers lagging behind the rest of the unit, making quick, bloody work of the trio with his knife and their firearms. The platoon's leader, an SS officer named Helldorf (Aksel Hennie), might have continued forward, but upon discovering some gold dropped by Aatami, he makes it his mission to hunt down this stranger and steal his valuable cargo.

Everything else about the story is a matter of the Nazis getting closer to and being fought off by Aatami, who takes advantage of the terrain, the Germans' own weapons and traps, some good old-fashioned near-immortality as befits of figure as legendary as this hero. As a veteran of the Winter War with the Soviet Union, Aatami gained the nickname "The Immortal," for the body count attached to him and the inability of anyone to stop him. That, as well as a dead wife and child, is the only back story we learn about the man. It's unimportant, except as a reasonable rationale for him to want to escape and as some justification for just how much Aatami survives over the course of the story.

Mostly, he's defined by his actions, which include using a minefield to lure some Nazis to their deaths—helping one directly by way of a mine in one of the movie's earliest moments of surprise—and staying submerged in a river as some soldiers row a boat out to where he's hiding—leading to a most ingenious and gruesome way to find more breathable air. Helander's ideas for some dementedly clever ways to dispatch the Nazis seem spaced out because they may run out too soon.

Beyond that, it's obvious he's storing much of the narrative's momentum and energy for a climactic chase, which brings a group of abducted women into the mix and takes the skies in a particularly ludicrous way. All of this, obviously, is meant to be just a bit ridiculous, if not more so. When the movie is, it's some twisted fun, but the minimal ambitions here are apparent in how infrequently the Sisu actually achieves that sensation.

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