2023 has already seen action cinema reach some amazing heights, from the high-art elevation of John Wick: Chapter 4, to the western shonen sports drama of Creed III, even the one-take shoot-out scene in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3. So when a film like Sisu comes out, it can’t help but feel slight, even if that is somewhat by design. It is by and large as simple and straight-forward as an action flick gets: Man finds gold, Nazis find man, Nazis try and take gold, man makes them regret it.
It’s a 90-minute feature that is so lean, it’s possible that quite a bit of usable meat was thrown away in the attempt to remove all traces of fat from the cut. But then again, even if it is just a thin excuse to have our stoic action lead cut, shoot, and blow up Nazis for an hour and a half… well, there’s never not a good time for such things, right?
It functions much like Overlord in how Jalmari Helander’s direction for this WWII-set action flick borrows from old-school pulp exploitation cinema, and even some adjacent Golden Age comic book imagery in its Nazi-decking hero. The presentation of said putdowns are pretty cool as well, with bodies gibbing all over the place like we’re in Castle Wolfenstein, not to mention some… inventive uses for a pickaxe.
Jorma Tommila’s lead performance as Aatami, ‘The Immortal’, adds a lot to the effect as well, especially for the kind of emblematic work the script is putting him through. The title ‘Sisu’ is a Finnish word that… doesn’t really have a direct English translation (even though just about every line of this film is in English). It’s basically a one-word description for a lot of heroic traits like bravery, resilience, and stoicism, and in context, it defines the kind of bad-ass that you can only find in Finland.
The film fashions Aatami into a national hero who fits that word. Someone who represents the fighting spirit of the land, and who defends it and its riches from invaders. It reaches a similar mythic tone as something like RRR did for India, or Captain America does for the U.S., and while I recognise how this kind of nationalistic… well, let’s call it what it is, propaganda, can lead to shitty things, I don’t necessarily see this as one of them in and of itself. Artistic icons like this can carry a lot of power, and honestly, even I kind of got swept up in just how cool Aatami is on-screen. Rather than directly spoil everything, I’ll just give my favourite example. In one scene, he’s hiding underwater, and every time the Nazi commander (Aksel Hennie) sends an officer down to deal with him, Aatami slashes their windpipe and sucks the air out of their lungs so that he can keep breathing. Holy shit, dude!
And that’s why the potential thematic side effects of this kind of story don’t really bother me that much: Because it’s fun without feeling like it needs or even wants to be taken all that seriously. It’s ridiculously violent and gory, with a decent sense of humour to match, to the point of coming across as camp at times. And for as economical as the storytelling is, the performances sell all the important parts, from Aksel Hennie being every bit as slimy as the role requires, to Mimosa Willamo getting some prime bad-ass lines and crushing them every time, to Tommila delivering a lot of cool with very few words and a lot of primal physicality. It’s an action flick that focuses solely on the action, and while the interconnecting scenes aren’t all that engaging, they don’t really have enough time to stick around before things get right back to the blood splatter. It’s the definition of simple but effective.
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