A model of this assessment was printed along side the world premiere of Sisu: Street to Revenge at Improbable Fest in September 2025. It has been up to date for the movie’s theatrical launch.
A few years in the past, a buddy 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 buddy 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 kind. Put a display exhibiting Street to Revenge out within the open, and you could possibly entice extra action-movie addicts than you’d know what to do with.
Like the unique Sisu, Street to Revenge is gentle 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 method via scores of Nazis after they steal the baggage of gold nuggets he’s painstakingly mined. Street to Revenge finds Aatami in 1946, returning to his rustic house 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 Pink 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 Pink Military again within 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 combat again. However that further contact hardly appears crucial; Street to Revenge already has every little thing it wants. There’s a easy man with a sentimental, non-simple objective. 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 along with his lifeless household, and likewise as a result of some very dangerous males worry and hate him. He needs to go house, however house now 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 harm alongside the best way to the inevitable boss combat. Draganov delivers speeches. Aatami doesn’t discuss in any respect. An amazing many issues blow up in stunning, thrilling style.
There’s a type of straight-faced ridiculousness to numerous Street to Revenge. A few of it comes within the type of the improbably in depth harm Aatami takes en route with out capitulating. (“Sisu,” we’re informed in expository textual content at the start of each films, is an untranslatable Finnish excellent, “a white-knuckled type of braveness and unimaginable willpower.”) A few of it’s within the resourceful however unlikely means he makes use of to destroy the lads looking him down. He has a truck and his fists. They’ve weapons, explosives, motorbikes, physique armor, planes stuffed with bombs, and extra.
And on prime of all that, Aatami’s objective of trying to maneuver a home throughout miles of occupied territory is quixotic and a bit ludicrous. Stopping the Soviets from getting their palms on a single factor that issues to him is clearly vital to Aatami, however the picture of him attempting to guard a creaky outdated truck stuffed 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 maintain issues so simple as attainable,” Helander informed Polygon in an interview at Improbable Fest in Austin, the place the movie had its full of life 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 aspect. The villains die in cathartic, usually unlikely, however at all times satisfying methods. Nothing right here is supposed to linger previous the adrenaline spike when a rushing motorbike will get a grenade shoved into its wheel, pops improbably upward into mid-air, and explodes. This isn’t a film to take house with you and talk about 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 fascinated with character growth than spectacle shall be bored; viewers preferring the realism of well-trained our bodies in sophisticated, choreographed feats of athleticism shall be disillusioned. That’s superb. Sisu: Street to Revenge isn’t bait for his or her explicit, private traps. This film does one factor, and does it effectively, 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.
