He will kill them, then he will eat them, as is his right
dir: Jalmari Helander
2025
Sisu was, in its way, the perfect Nazi-killing action film, so in their infinite wisdom the makers decided to make another one, this time with the Soviets as antagonists, because why not.
I mean, they have snazzy uniforms, and no regard for human rights, so they’re perfect. They are at least recognisable and easily hateable, since the Soviets we’re talking about are the Red Army that raped and pillaged its way back to the borders of the Soviet Empire after the war ended.
This is a Finnish flick, though, and considering Finland’s tortured history with the Russians, it has to involve actual history in order to angry up the blood. After numerous wars the Finns were forced to cede the Karelia region to the Commies, and of course that’s where the taciturn hero of these two movies had his home, the home he was so desperate to return to in the first flick.
But the Soviets have already murdered his family, and all Finns are being expelled from the region, so what’s a war hero to do other than go home, cry a bunch for the loss of his wife and children, and then literally deconstruct the entire house, slap it onto a truck, and then start driving for Finland?
Our hero, Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), or the Immortal, as he is nicknamed, doesn’t know it, but the Soviets really, really hate him for embarrassing them during the Winter War, and they dispatch a crusty old jerk (Stephen Lang) to capture Korpi and send him to the gulag in Siberia, as a warning to any Finns who are thinking about getting uppity.
The other supposed benefit / bonus is that the crusty old Jerk Draganov is the same person who butchered Korpi’s family. Hearing him lovingly describe killing Korpi’s son with a shovel is one of the most sick-inducing things I’ve ever heard in any film. But Korpi is completely unaware of any of this for most of the flick’s shortish running time (it’s just an eyelash under 90 minutes), so from his perspective, it’s just the story of his life. Of course random jerks want to kill him: He’s awesome, and it’s the price you pay for awesomeness.
That first battle section, on the road, is pretty much Mad Max / Fury Road writ large. Vehicular carnage, motor mayhem, as one of the title cards helpfully indicates, it looks and seems great because we are programmed to find this stuff thrilling, or at least I am.
At first, it’s enough to see that there are faceless goons on motorbikes wearing bulletproof armour, well prepared to fight the unstoppable Finn, and you think “well at least they’ve put some thought into it before they die, not making it too easy”, but also you might then think “who the fuck had that sort of gear back then?” And that’s the thing, I made the mistake of taking any of this too seriously. You’re not watching movies where a silent Finn kills hundreds of people mostly with his bare hands or whatever weapon is in reach because it’s a documentary.
It is, after all, a cartoon. A well made cartoon, but a cartoon nonetheless. By the time Korpi is killing people with train mounted ballistic missiles or knocking fighter planes out of the sky with wooden beams from him deconstructed house, I kept wondering when Bugs Bunny was going to show up and shriek “Ain’t I a stinker?”
That comment probably dates me, somewhat. I just had a moment where I wasn’t sure if anyone under 40 would even know who or what Bugs Bunny is. Where would your average Gen Z / Gen Alphas have even seen any of those cartoons they used to play before movies at the cinema?
Uh, to make this more relevant (to an entire demographic that will never, ever read anything I’ve ever written anyway), it’s like this film goes from Pixar’s Cars and turns into Initial D / Wangan Midnight / MF Ghost something with Pokémon, maybe?
With lots of torture thrown in for good measure. The signature them of these films, as well as the title, is that Korpi, the Immortal, being the embodiment of everything great about people from Finland, literally embodies the qualities inherent in the title: a supernatural level of grit, tenacity, the will to endure and survive in the face of overwhelming adversity.
In other words, puffery and bullshit, but what’s not to like when it’s applied to action flicks? Those traits are the ones you want in your hero, and maybe at least one of the villains, some of the time, because then it’s a contest of diametrically opposed equals, rather than a god against cockroaches, that way it’s a bit of a contest. Who will win, we might wonder before acknowledging “eh, it’s always the hero, because they’re the hero.”
It’s all about how many people they take with them though. Korpi is no John Wick: he doesn’t kill 400,000 people who had it coming because they insulted his puppy: Korpi wouldn’t want kill any of these scum if they weren’t so determined to end, torture or incarcerate him. He even gets a chance, but spares Draganov, not realising the old Russian coot is the reason he’s being harassed so terribly on his way towards the Finnish border.
So the “Revenge” part of the title is meaningless until Draganov reveals their connection, and also chillingly tells Korpi that the goal isn’t to end him (even though the appalling torture he’s subjected to would kill someone five times his size), it’s to send him to the worst place the full might of the terrible Soviet totalitarian regime can come up with, being Siberia.
This is not a flick with a lot of dialogue, in this movie. There are singular lines spoken between gaps of like 15 minutes. In fact, this flick could entirely work as a silent movie, or at least a dialogue-less movie. There’s only so many times someone can say what a tough motherfucker Korpi is before the audience might be compelled to say out loud “fuck, okay, we get it, he’s really tough, get over yourselves.”
No shade at the actor, though. Like most actors he doesn’t get to choose his dialogue, so if he says almost nothing for an hour and a half, well, he didn’t have anything important to say. His endless grimaces say more than enough. Calling him stoic doesn’t even get close, but this man is not an unfeeling lump. He cares. I think there’s a dog he looks after at some stage.
I feel like the earlier bits of the flick work better than what comes later on, but that’s because I feel like the makers are taunting us by making it so obvious that this is all an unrealistic cartoon. There can be fun within that, like the sequence where Korpi has to silently slink through a train carriage filled with sleeping Soviet soldiers, and everything goes from unpleasant to difficult to impossible and then gets even worse somehow, but maybe I draw the line at a sequence, again to alienate younger readers, looked like the Coyote trying to chase down the Road Runner on a rocket.
Maybe my willing suspension of disbelief needs some work. The flick ends in a suitably patriotic way, which I guess is nice for the Finns that watch this, but to us non-Finns it seems like nationalistic pandering, but that’s okay. When was the last time you saw a patriotic flick from Finland?
The best thing about this flick is wishing that this guy was (currently) fighting on the Ukrainian side against the Putin-led kleptocratic state that has replaced the Soviet Union. The soldiers are just as horrible / willing to commit atrocities / war crimes against civilians, but there would be something so satisfying if a Ukrainian folk hero could give them all what for and take up the mantel.
Unfortunately, we, the sad, collective, we live in the so-called “real” world, where wishing doesn’t change a thing, and the bad guys often win and are rewarded for it, and they rarely if ever get their comeuppance.
Let us at least occasionally revel in the vicarious thrill of a gnarled hero rearranging the heads, faces and internal organs of a legion of bad guys, thus earning the right to destroy the one who dared murder his family in the first place. It is righteous, it is over the top, it is too much, and it is barely enough.
Not as new and thus surprising as the first one, but solid all the same.
7 times the underlying message, really, is “don’t fuck with Finland”, a message I heartily support out of 10
“Siberia is a very bad place to be immortal.” – I’ve heard it’s pretty harsh even for us mere mortals as well - Sisu: Road to Revenge
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