Old Guys R Us: Part Two – Sisu: Road to Revenge repeats the formula of the first movie, of the iron-hard old Finnish dude taking on unimaginable numbers of bad guys… and prevailing, in a vastly entertaining way.
He’s John Wick in a beard, transposed back to the 1940s. First time around the enemy was the Nazis. But time has moved on for Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), the war is over and the Nazis have been defeated. For Finns the result has not been entirely good. In a voiceover prologue that’s almost the entire movie’s spoken-word spend, we learn that the Soviet Union has advanced into Finland, taken a good chunk of territory and pushed any ethnic Finns there into what remains of their country.
Aatami, a Finn like no other, is one of the expelled, but rather than go quietly he has decided to go back to the old homestead, inside what is now the USSR, dismantle the log cabin he and his family called home, and transport it – on a massive truck – to safety in what’s left of Finland.
Writer-director Jalmari Helander gets all this set-up out of the way quicker than it’s taken me to write this. It’s enough to provide a plot frame and convince us that Aatami is a good guy – he has the big, soppy family dog in tow just to prove it. So that when his nemesis, the Russian who murdered all his family, decides to finish the job by killing Aatami, battle lines are clear and we know whose side we’re on.
What follows is an extended chase across the blasted wastes of Finland (Estonia, in fact) comprising a series of stunts, most of them in big machines. The big truck is later replaced by a big tank, and eventually a big train, but no matter how he’s travelling, the resourceful Aatami always outwits the malevolent, but similarly old and bearded Yeagor Dragunov (Stephen Lang), as he assails him with assassins and tech, bombs and bastardy.
Aatami is a grizzled Roadrunner and Dragunov is a craggy Wile E Coyote. Lang brings a bit of malevolent twinkle to the role of the resourceful-but-not-resourceful-enough villain and though he doesn’t get much to say, he did enough to keep me interested. Tommila’s Aatami says not a word throughout – maybe he muttered under his breath at one point – it’s beard-acting, eyebrow acting, smirk-acting, done well.
This is a big-budget movie by Finnish standards and it’s the stunts that are the real star. They are intricate in their planning, audacious and majestic at the same time. Just when I was beginning to think there was no point watching much more of the film – I have seen the first film, after all, and know what the deal is – Helander would unveil a stunt of ridiculous ingenuity involving impossible physics and nonsense consequences. If the various bits of machinery/props had said “Acme Corp” on them it could not be more cartoonlike.
The iron fortitude of Aatami is the big sell. Sisu, the Finnish concept of stoic determination and extreme grit is what the film turns on, and as Aatami is subjected to ordeal by broken bottle, aircraft machine-gun, electric scourge, petrol bomb, bullet to the face (he barely notices), rat trap and so on, the lack of emotion is what we are paying to see.
Death comes to Aatami’s assailants regularly and nastily, in grand gonzo style. Men lose their heads, die by pickaxe, bullet, explosion and so on. Mad Max is in the mix, so is the madly improbable stuntery of Buster Keaton – Helander references The General explicitly at one point.
So that makes it a movie-buff movie? If you insist. Great fun. Even greater fun if you haven’t seen the first one.
Sisu: Road to Revenge – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
