Movie Review: “Sisu: Road to Revenge” takes a Wrong Turn or Three

I am an audience of one at a late afternoon “preview” matinee of “Sisu 2,” aka “Sisu: Road to Revenge,” the sequel to the savage sleeper hit by Finnish carnage Jalmari Helander.

Do the locals know something I don’t? Or are the good folks in “The Last Capital of the Confederacy” showing their red ball cap displeasure at a movie about mowing down Russians by staying home?

I’m guessing it’s the fact that Screen Gems’ marketing didn’t spend enough to move the needle even a centimeter that dampened enthusiasm, as nobody knows about it.

That’s no big deal, because this sequel is inferior in pretty much every way to the original “Sisu,” which came out of nowhere back in 2023 and which takes its title from a Finnish word that more of less means unfettered rage. It’s not on a par with Helander’s “Rare Exports” Santa-horror splatter film either. He’s due for a misstep. Here it is.

“Road to Revenge” brings back our non-speaking, unstoppable and unkillable Finnish commando Korpi (Jorma Tommila), this time out to haul the pieces to his house across the Russian border after the end of World War II.

When your anti-hero is “unstoppable” and “unkillable,” that lowers the stakes. A lot.

Throw in feeble pacing and thus no urgency to its story of driving, shooting, stabbing and missle-launching his way through legions of belligerant Russians, fresh from their triumph in “The Great Patriotic War,” and you’ve got a thriller whose only creative bits are random moments of Russian-mutilating and murdering.

Remember, the vodka/borscht-folk and their dictator sided with the Nazis at the beginning of WWII, only to F-around and find out you can never trust a Nazi. And the Russians further earned their history’s bad-guys status by invading Finland at the start of the war, and paying dearly for their miscalculation, at least for a time.

The Soviet Russians annexed Finnish territory at war’s end, and that’s where Korpi lived. So he’s got his passport and his battered, oversized military truck and he’s aiming to move the logs of his old homestead, where his family was slaughtered, to a new location across the new border.

Ivan doesn’t want him to get away with it.

The stages of his quest are broken into superfluous “chapters” like “Old Enemies,” “Motor Mayhem:” and “Incoming.” The dialogue, almost all of it by a Russian tormentor (Stephen Lang) who commanded the troops who failed to finish off the Finn in the first film, is every bit as pointless.

“Unleash Hell,” like they haven’t already. “Keep your eyes open,” the most worthless command cliche of them all. And “Look at me,” served up as if he isn’t looking at you.

Duels against armored commandos on motorcycles (!?), airborne fighter bombers and the like ensue. Our hero takes another licking and keeps on ticking. The Russians? Let the body count commence, Comrades!

I laughed at a few of the more audacious butcherings, but that was early on. The narrative settles into a slog in the middle acts and no pull-out-the-stops train ride finale could drag it out of the mud.

Rating: R, graphic violence, pretty much start to finish, profanity

Cast: Jorma Tommila, Richard Brake and Stephen Lang.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jalmari Helander. A Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:29