Sisu
Jalmari Helander’s new action film pits an old man against a group of roving nazi soldiers in 1944. And some gold.
We’re currently seeing a reappraisal in the action film world. Flicks that would normally get the straight-to-video treatment nowadays have a better shot at theatrical runs, thanks to projects like John Wick celebrating its diverse array of stunt workers and martial arts stars of the big and small screen. Perhaps it’s rekindled interest in reserving a little more space for the simple beat-em-ups that we’ve pushed off to the margins every so often.
Not all of these DTV titles have to have something to say, in fact it’s better that they don’t in some cases. But the driving force behind them is always different, whether it’s a vehicle to jumpstarting an up-and-comer’s career or creating a passion project. Sisu is one of those movies that feels like an idea we’d see in something released straight to video or VOD, but with a heftily inflated budget that it intends to use as much of every cent it can onscreen. But there are some things that DTV action flicks have done (or tried) that attempt something at a variety within the scope they’ve set. Sisu has an issue with variety that may prove frustrating for some viewers.
The story is less of an actual story as it is a task that our main character, the silent Aatami Korpi is trying to complete that takes the entirety of the film. What that task is doesn’t get revealed until the very end, but it does have a lot to do with a lot of gold he mines from the wilderness of Lapland, Finland. It’s 1944 and the nazis are destroying cities and towns left and right, harassing those fleeing for shelter and safe passage, and so Korpi is harassed after mining what he and his horse can carry across the countryside. When nazis get in his way, Korpi puts them down brutally and without a second thought. But the pursuing platoon of Germans will not leave him alone until they take his gold.
Split into chapters, Sisu divides Korpi’s journey into loosely strung together scenarios depending on the countryside’s geography and proximity to various stages of civilization. But his demeanor doesn’t change and neither does his pursuers, making the tension wear thin faster than it should. Its set pieces where Korpi eviscerates each nazi soldier he comes across is suitably gory, gruesome, and gleeful. If there was a little more to chew on the one-note set pieces could be taken in as a simple pleasure to pull us into the next moment, knowing there’d be something new and exciting to surprise us. But Sisu doesn’t really have much to show us that is new, exciting as it may be. Some bits will get your fists in the air but it could do more.
If you know you’re going to see Sisu (it’s a lot of fun saying that out loud), you know the bloody action is going to be the main draw. Nazis on the receiving end of that bloody action are just as deserving of being the recipients as any other filmic antagonists, if not more so. But the targets being nazis doesn’t add much to the experience either. Korpi expresses no such disgust in the hate group as far as the audience can tell; he simply kills them because they tried to steal from him and continue to bother him on this wordless task. And even in this vaccum of Korpi vs. nazis things kind of start to feel stale aside from the different ways a bad guy can be put down in as grim a fashion as possible.
The action does in fact provide a lot of entertainment value; you could judge the film solely on its merits of pure action and nothing else and it would still excel on its visual accomplishments. But we should dig deeper here. There is some very good stunt work here too but there’s nothing really underneath it to support it and help it go further. The old man proves nigh invincible and after every instance of certain death or merely severe hospitalization we feel Korpi isn’t affected in any meaningful way. It’s almost a John Wick problem where lifting some version of plot armor that worked in Stahelski’s series is simply getting reappropriated here but without adjusting to its own unique world it wants to establish.
Sisu in general feels like a short film with multiple episodic treatments to extend its runtime to feature-length. Given Jalmari Helander’s first feature Rare Exports and his strengths displayed in fleshing out original material around the folktales of Joulupukki, that strength is strangely absent here in leaving the quiet and mysterious figure Aatami Korpi untapped. The main character is the one that becomes less interesting as the film goes on. Because his mystery is explained to us through dialogue and by those he is now hunting, the hunted become far more intriguing than Korpi despite your desire to see him walk over their splayed corpses by film’s end. I think Sisu would benefit much more if Helander mined a little more into Aatami Korpi. There’s a goldmine in there.
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