Sisu: Road to Revenge Movie Review: Looney Tunes on steroids

It isn’t entirely a bad thing to call Sisu: Road to Revenge “Looney Tunes on steroids” because who wouldn’t want Wile E Coyote to actually, sincerely, “go for it” once. In the sequel to the 2022 film, Sisu, Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) straps himself to a giant rocket and launches himself onto the bad guy. The only thing missing was “ACME” stenciled over the rocket. Sisu ends with Aatami walking away with a bag of gold. In the sequel, he’s back for more money, but this time he is coming for your wallets. And apparently, he is a businessman now because the sequel tells you how he has learnt new terms like “Brand familiarity” and “Low-risk investment. Sure, it’s more “personal” now because the main antagonist (played by Stephen Lang) is the one who killed Aatami’s family, and now he’s out to finish the job. Sure, the action is still relentless and violent as the first one. But this looks more like a fan-made short film with a higher budget. Wait, why slight the fans? Who knows, maybe they could have made it better. Sisu 2 is like the sequel that a group of friends will collectively come up with after a drinking session. It might sound cool when high, but that doesn’t mean you sober up and spend money bringing the guy from Avatar on board.

Director: Jalmari Helander

Cast: Jorma Tommila, Stephen Lang, Richard Brake

The film can’t help but start blowing people up. And it looks ridiculous every time they do it. It was fun at first, but pretty soon you go “Wait, he could have easily avoided that,” and pretty soon you understand that the film goes by the great filmmaking philosophy of 80s action movies: “Do whatever looks cool, make sense later.” While this isn’t necessarily bad, you expect way more innovative stunts from the franchise that started with a guy slitting someone’s throat underwater and sucking air out of his bleeding trachea to stay submerged for a few more seconds to evade enemies on the ground. Once the action gets tiring, the film tries to grab your attention with plain gore. You get the point of the gore if it either comes through an action sequence or through a torture sequence because it still tells a story (both of which happen in the film as well). But then Aatami just walks around showing his badly shredded back to the camera for an uncomfortably long time, with nothing of substance happening. When he rolls his bloodied back over a broken piece of glass, trying to hide instead of fighting like he has been doing all through the film until then (and keeps on doing shortly after), that’s when you realise you might be watching a parody of The Passion of the Christ.

Unlike the popular belief, I don’t think a shallow cash-grab sequel takes anything away from the original film. You still have your memory of watching the first film. And Sisu 2 doesn’t wreck the legacy of its protagonist either. He is still the stoic badass he once was, and he can still go on many more adventures. And if there is a threequel, I would still watch it with excitement. Bring it on! But by the rules of franchise inflation, you would expect such a tepid film in the sixth or seventh entry with a new (usually unknown) writer-director. If the franchise seems to struggle for new ideas in the second film itself, then the Sisu train might already be out of steam. However, there are times when you are happy to be proven wrong, and this could actually be one such time.