A model of this evaluate was printed along with the world premiere of Sisu: Street to Revenge at Implausible Fest in September 2025. It has been up to date for the movie’s theatrical launch.
A few years in the past, a good friend of mine who was hooked on The Wire had a favourite icebreaker query. In a season 2 episode of the present, crime legend Omar (Michael Okay. Williams) baits a entice for conniving addict and police snitch Bubbles (Andre Royo) by leaving a radiator out within the open, figuring out Bubs shall be unable to withstand a salable piece of scrap metallic. My good friend used to ask individuals, “What would your enemies use to bait the proper entice for you?” Watching Sisu: Street to Revenge, Jalmari Helander’s sequel to his stripped-down 2022 revenge film Sisu, took me straight again to that query, as a result of the film appears like genre-fan bait in its purest, most uncut type. Put a display screen displaying Street to Revenge out within the open, and you can entice extra action-movie addicts than you’d know what to do with.
Like the unique Sisu, Street to Revenge is mild on dialogue and heavy on righteous, well-justified bloodshed. Sisu, set in 1944, has a grizzled Finnish military veteran, Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila, the writer-director’s brother-in-law) carving his manner by scores of Nazis after they steal the luggage of gold nuggets he’s painstakingly mined. Street to Revenge finds Aatami in 1946, returning to his rustic residence in part of Finland that’s been ceded to the USSR. He painstakingly disassembles his home and makes an attempt to maneuver the supplies throughout the brand new border to unoccupied Finland, however hits resistance from brutal Crimson Military officer Igor Draganov (style stalwart and recurrent Avatar film baddie Stephen Lang), who’s been ordered to trace down and kill the terrifying determine who carved up the Crimson Military again in the three-month Winter Struggle.
Draganov personally oversaw the vicious purge of Finnish locals that killed Aatami’s spouse and kids, which provides Aatami a private cause to struggle again. However that further contact hardly appears needed; Street to Revenge already has every little thing it wants. There’s a easy man with a sentimental, non-simple aim. We all know he’s a great man, principally as a result of he has a pet canine and a worn, beloved image of himself together with his lifeless household, and in addition as a result of some very dangerous males concern and hate him. He needs to go residence, however residence not exists for him, so he has to repair that.
The very dangerous males come after Aatami in video-game-esque escalating waves, naturally dividing the film into six chapters the place he fights them off, taking more and more excruciating injury alongside the best way to the inevitable boss struggle. Draganov delivers speeches. Aatami doesn’t speak in any respect. A fantastic many issues blow up in shocking, thrilling vogue.
There’s a sort of straight-faced ridiculousness to a whole lot of Street to Revenge. A few of it comes within the type of the improbably in depth injury Aatami takes en route with out capitulating. (“Sisu,” we’re instructed in expository textual content initially of each films, is an untranslatable Finnish ultimate, “a white-knuckled type of braveness and unimaginable dedication.”) A few of it’s within the resourceful however unlikely means he makes use of to destroy the boys searching him down. He has a truck and his fists. They’ve weapons, explosives, motorbikes, physique armor, planes filled with bombs, and extra.
And on high of all that, Aatami’s aim of making an attempt to maneuver a home throughout miles of occupied territory is quixotic and a bit ludicrous. Stopping the Soviets from getting their arms on a single factor that issues to him is clearly necessary to Aatami, however the picture of him attempting to guard a creaky previous truck filled with lumber by no means stops being a bit foolish. Even Lang’s mustache-twiddling efficiency feels campy.
However the plot’s absolute minimalism provides Sisu: Street to Revenge an influence that reaches again to films like the primary John Wick, to John Rambo in First Blood (an open inspiration for Helander, who’s now contracted to direct a Rambo prequel), and to classics like Level Clean earlier than them. “I wish to hold issues so simple as attainable,” Helander instructed Polygon in an interview at Implausible Fest in Austin, the place the movie had its vigorous world-premiere screening in entrance of a crowd of enthusiastically whooping style followers.
As in Sisu, there’s no nuanced character work right here, no shades of grey or considerate explorations of trauma or conflicted metaphors about trendy society. There’s a hero and a bunch of principally nameless villains, representing humanity’s most irrationally oppressive and evil facet. The villains die in cathartic, usually unlikely, however all the time satisfying methods. Nothing right here is supposed to linger previous the adrenaline spike when a dashing motorbike will get a grenade shoved into its wheel, pops improbably upward into mid-air, and explodes. This isn’t a film to take residence with you and focus on afterward. It’s a gritty, dirty, usually grotesque model of a sugar-rush excessive.
That additionally means it’s a film solely meant for sure audiences. Viewers extra focused on character improvement than spectacle shall be bored; viewers preferring the realism of well-trained our bodies in difficult, choreographed feats of athleticism shall be upset. That’s advantageous. Sisu: Street to Revenge isn’t bait for his or her specific, private traps. This film does one factor, and does it nicely, through strategies that escalate to almost cartoonish proportions. And it’s clear in completely each grim, gory, gutting-it-out scene that Helander and Tommila know precisely who they’re making this film for.
Sisu: Street to Revenge is in theaters now.
