Sisu (2023)

Directed by Jalmari Helander. Starring Jorma Tommila, Aksei Hennie, Jack Doolan, Onni Tommila, Mimosa Williamo. [R]

During the Lapland campaign near the end of the second World War, Finnish loner Aatami (Jorma Tommila) strikes a rich vein of gold, but while traveling across the bleak countryside to collect on his haul, he crosses paths with a German Waffen-SS platoon, and it goes bad for all parties involved. Alone and greatly outnumbered, Aatami becomes a one-man killing machine, rampaging against all odds for vengeance and to reclaim his bounty. A lean, mean, deliciously brutal, and stylishly bloody action picture with threadbare character definition and inconsistent momentum, but if you want to see Nazis get it good—and you damn well better—it puts on quite the show. Plentiful shades of John Wick, Quentin Tarantino’s pulpy revenge fantasies, First Blood, and more, so it saves its originality for killing methods and bravado; granted, the latter involves a cartoonish final showdown where the humorless, obsessive hero survives the sort of certain death that would have ended even the nigh-invincible likes of Wick or The Night Comes For Us’ Joe Taslim, but if he’d gone down fighting before the end, we wouldn’t get to finally hear him say a line of dialogue during the last chapter; with that deadpan scowl and deeply-furrowed glabella, he didn’t need words to say exactly how he felt. Kjell Lagerroos’ striking photography depicts the northern Finland wilderness like a gorgeously desolate hellscape. Title is a Finnish word without translation, roughly meaning resilience, determination, etc. Premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival.

74/100