Sisu: Road to Revenge (2025)

Sequels arrive with expectations. This one arrives with a truck. Aatami Korpi, the Finnish ex-commando who refuses to die, returns to the Karelian house where his family was murdered, takes it apart log by log, and hauls the pieces toward the border. The Soviets take offense. They release the officer responsible for the murders from a Siberian prison and aim him at the man. A cross-country chase follows, involving attack aircraft, a derelict tank, a ballistic missile repurposed as a propulsion device, and long passages of near-total silence.

For the purposes of classification, this is a barren vintage. The cast is Finnish and Estonian men of a certain grimness, and nobody in the production appears to have given the matter a second thought. There is no romance, no interiority, no speech about the human condition. The wilderness is not a cause, it is a place to bleed in. The antagonist is a Soviet officer and the KGB, which places the grievance in the realm of national memory instead of economics. The film runs on stunts, splinters, and the sound of a man refusing to expire. It has no interest in instructing anybody about anything.

Some will find this emptiness bracing. I find it merely rare, like a wine with no additives and no terroir, bracing and a little austere. The picture is competent, inventive in its violence, and entirely without a message, which in the current climate reads almost as a provocation of its own. The box office was unkind. The critics were not. Both responses are defensible. We are left with a specimen that resists the taxonomy, and there is a strange relief in logging a zero across the board. The ledger stays clean tonight.