I Just Saw

I just saw Sisu and it was ehhhhhhhh… alright. A war film with an exploitation edge, it struggles to escape feeling Tarantino-lite, with its chapter headings and gore and pulpy characterisation. With Tarantino that works because he’s a genius at what he does, managing to stuff every frame with detail and create a whole film out of set-pieces, so even if the story is less than the sum of its parts it hardly matters.

Sisu’s writer/director, Jalmari Helander, isn’t at that level because his vision isn’t as specific. What we essentially have here is a “dad” movie, something for men of a certain age to watch from their recliners.

We’re in rural Finland during the dying days of WWII. In the midst of the Lapland War, to be specific, when the Soviet Union agreed to end hostilities with Finland so long as they expelled all German soldiers. This followed the Continuation War, during which Finland and Germany were aligned, and led to Germany turning on their former allies.

Legendary commando Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) has retired to pan for gold and hits a seam that will make him a rich man. Or would, if the Nazis hadn’t adopted a “scorched earth” policy, destroying all highways and settlements in their wake.

SS commander Bruno Helldorf (Aksel Hennie) intercepts Korpi and tries to kill him so that he can take his gold and potentially buy his way out of a Nuremberg trial, assisted by Wolf (Jack Doolan) and Schütze (Onni Tommila, Jorma’s son). But he hasn’t counted on Korpi’s legend, as a man so feared among the Soviets they called him immortal. Meanwhile, Mimosa Willa plays Aino, unofficial spokesperson of the “bitches”, a group of Finns captured by the Nazis seemingly under the Mosaic injunction to keep the women for themselves.

Jorma plays Korpi with almost no dialogue. Such roles tend to be overrated when really, how hard is it to not say words? I’m sure if I tried it I’d fall on my face, but still. Jorma does commit to playing a character though, emoting and contorting his face to make it seem like he’s a traumatised ex-soldier.

This isn’t a performance like Nicolas Cage’s in Willy’s Wonderland (2021), where he’s being paid to look bored and occasionally swing a bat at a soft toy. Jorma’s also something of an older male sex symbol, getting the full body shot of silky and rippling muscles normally reserved for twenty-somethings.

My main issue with the film is that he’s facing off against some of the thickest Nazis outside a Louis Theroux documentary. Other critics have praised what they see as the intentional absurdity of Sisu, but I don’t know. It just seemed like sloppy storytelling to me. The entire film is essentially a chase, and I can’t get involved with that when every decision made by Helldorf and his crew is for the benefit of not killing the protagonist.

Maybe this is just me, but I struggle with films like this to not ask “Why don’t they just shoot him in the head?”, and after the second or third time of asking I start docking points. I’d have honestly preferred it if Korpi was just explicitly supernatural. He made a deal with the Devil in the wastes of Lapland, and now no worldly weapon can harm him.

Politically, I’m not sure how much Finland gets to make a film like this when they were allied with the Nazis before the Soviets forced their hand. Sisu’s being sold as a revenge film but it’s really not. Korpi just wants his gold back, which is a fine motive, but Helander seems to be going for an Inglorious Basterds-esque dynamic. The Nazis were bastards to the Finns, no doubt about it. But Sisu is functioning at a certain level as propaganda, whereas a film about Jewish vengeance doesn’t come across that way.

The gore is pretty good. Some CGI blood and fire undercuts it a little, but there are some good squirmy scenes, my favourite being when Korpi uses one of his wounds to relieve pressure on his neck during an attempted hanging. Sisu’s far from perfect; nonetheless, it’s a quick and amusing action piece.