‘Sisu’ Review: Jalmari Helander’s WWII Action Film Makes History Fun… And Incredibly Gory

For wearisome reasons, the World War II cinema canon focuses mostly on the same handful of European nations — Germany, France, Italy, and England — and spares little room for others. This is a mildly annoying habit that the movies will inevitably self-correct; the world happens to be pretty big and the war was fought across all its corners, so we’ll never run out of stories to tell about it. We’ll just have to go out of the way to find them, like, say, to Lapland, the setting of Jalmari Helander’s “Sisu,” a wartime action thriller of bloody excess where location is everything.

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“Sisu” offers what the WWII movie subgenre needs: a minor change in scenery. Taiga and scrubland; how exciting! In Helander’s body of work, it’s hardly a change at all; he’s set his other two features, “Rare Exports” and “Big Game,” in Finland’s northerly Lapland region, too, but the old familiarities of WWII movies are freshened up against that sparse, unforgiving backdrop. “Sisu” starts with a history primer, then immediately sets the rest of the film’s tone with a movie Western tradition: a title card triumphantly proclaiming humble prospector Aatami Korpi’s (Jorma Tommila) discovery of the mother lode. Lapland is a lonely place, but Korpi has toughed it out in this eerily pretty middle of nowhere, his dog his only companion, in pursuit of the land’s natural riches. Having found them, he’s faced with a transportation problem. Gold is heavy. Getting it quickly back to Helsinki is a challenge on its own, without Nazis meddling in Korpi’s task. Naturally, Nazis decide to meddle.

This is bad news for Korpi, as he runs into a squadron of German troops hauling ass out of Finland on a scorched earth retreat, burning away all traces of human civilization along the way. They deduce the nature of his cargo and try to take it for themselves, and that’s bad news for the Germans. Korpi happens to be a legendary Finnish soldier nicknamed by the Russians after a soulless, unkillable sorcerer central in their nation’s folklore. The Nazis picked the wrong miner to rob. 

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Helander builds “Sisu” with a chase-hide-fight structure. Korpi outpaces the Germans, offing them when he can and surviving the unsurvivable the rest of the time, as the Germans, led by Obersturmführer Bruno Helldorf (Aksel Hennie), scratch their heads in bafflement over Korpi’s stubborn refusal to die. It’s like “Mad Max: Fury Road,” but slowed down and with less urgency. Not much hangs in the plot’s balance. “Sisu” comes down to a game of cat and mouse between an ex-combatant and the frenzied officer determined to kill him against even his superior’s orders. Helldorf’s desire to exact petty vengeance on Korpi drives the film, which consequently plays low-key. Helander appears content to avoid connections between Finland’s past and present; if anything, he leans hard on audience acceptance of Nazis as the ultimate screen villain. 

The fun police might call that decision “lazy.” But massacring anonymous S.S. goons for entertainment is always a victimless crime, and in “Sisu,” the trope offers viewers a hyper-specific form of big-screen satisfaction. There aren’t a whole lot of WWII movies that take place in Finland, after all, so Helander is simply claiming a piece of the Nazi action war thriller genre for himself, and for his country, by blowing up Third Reich stormtroopers, or impaling them, or gunning them down, or throwing them out of airplanes like Slim Pickens in “Dr. Strangelove.” Korpi isn’t picky. He gets the job done with an efficient and stoic sense of inevitability, and all the while, we get the sense that Helander is snickering off-camera. 

It takes a healthy sense of black humor to make a film like “Rare Exports,” where Santa Claus turns out not to be a jolly old elf, but rather an evil ice-encased horned colossus, or a film like “Big Game,” where a 13-year-old boy saves the President of these here United States of America from an assassination plot coming from inside the White House. Neither of these films attempts to play it straight for more than a few beats at a time here and there. They are intended to provoke our laughter and thrill us. In the specific case of “Sisu,” it’s both at the same time. There is a “Looney Tunes” sensibility at play here, buried mostly in Helldorf’s frankly insane insistence on executing Kopri instead of cutting his losses, and partly in the scientific fact that watching dumbfounded Nazis get blown to pulpy smithereens by landmines is innately hilarious. 

Maybe, maybe, this will come off as propagandist to some audiences. “Sisu” pays tribute to the Finnish spirit; English translations of the title will stumble over a lexical gap, but the gist of it is “intestinal fortitude.” “Sisu” is about gumption and determination, Finland’s allegiant rollercoaster ride throughout WWII, and what kind of country produces people capable of digging deep into the bowels of their being to keep fighting against the bleakest odds. It’s also about Slavic folklore in the same incidental way as the “John Wick” films. The assassin underworld has its Baba Yaga. Helldorf and his men have their Koschei the Deathless. Pity Helldorf. At least John Wick is good for a quick death. Korpi is just good for death, period, any way he can mete it out. 

Beyond the happy coincidence of a mythological motif and a high body count, “Sisu” has nothing in common with “John Wick,” the action film to which all other action films getting made right now are obliged to be compared. In “Sisu,” Helander honors the Spaghetti Western by referencing its masters, such as Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, Gianfranco Parolini, and Giulio Petroni. The classic touches belie his gallows humor and cartoony ultraviolence. Such images as a Wehrmacht officer bursting into a cloud of viscera delight the same as Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff and make a nice complement to Helander’s brief reminders of the part Finland played in WWII. He’s not passing himself off as a history teacher, of course. He’s just providing us with notes.  Besides, “Sisu” communicates the basics without glossing over the record, and best of all without taking up time better spent liquifying bad guys. [B+]

“Sisu” arrives in theaters on April 28.