It is that Finnish word “that cannot be translated” again, and yet which is translated, also again, in opening text, as “a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination”, which “manifests itself when all hope is lost.” Wikipedia suggests ‘guts’. Three years ago, writer/director Jalmari Helander introduced us, in Sisu, to Finnish war veteran and legend Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), an (old) man of few — which is to say almost no — words but much action and stoic endurance, and therefore an embodiment of the national characteristic that gave the film its title. Yet far from being a nationalist, Korpi was a rugged individualist, doggedly pursuing his own economic interests.
Now Korpi is back for Helander’s sequel Sisu: Road to Revenge, set in post-war 1946. At its heart is the wooden house once shared by Korpi with his beloved wife and two young sons (before they were slaughtered by Russians), but located in Karelia which has now fallen under Soviet occupation. So with his trusty white poodle, Korpi returns there in a big truck to dismantle his home single-handedly, timber by timber, so that he can take it back to Finnish territory for reassembly. Getting word of Korpi’s presence, a KGB officer (Richard Brake) unleashes mad-dog war criminal Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang) to finish what he had started and to take out the last surviving Korpi, ending the myth of his immortality. Yet faced with cars, tanks, bikers, fighter jets, bombers, and speeding, rocket-laden trains, Korpi once again dies very hard.
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Sometimes to build you must first destroy. Not only does Sisu: Road to Revenge deconstruct the building blocks of the original Sisu – one man facing a vicious army of odds, action episodes coming with boldly pulpish chapter headings (“Motor Mayhem”, “Incoming”, “Revenge”, etc.), a ridiculously high and bloody body count – but it reconstitutes them so that Korpi is now pitted not against fugitive Nazis, but against his “old enemies” (another chapter heading!) the Russians, who are as much out for revenge against him as he against them. Into this (again) are mixed materials from Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark and George Miller’s Mad Max 2 (both 1981), while Juri Seppǎ and Tuomas Wainǒlä’s score of horns and whistles turns this story of a farmhouse and a frontier into a Suomi western.
In what is essentially a long, barrelling chase movie, the action is relentless, and has little respect for the limits of physiological suffering let alone physical laws. Yet it is the ending that represents something new for Korpi. For while the film is set largely in a zone annexed by Russia, and their dialogue is all in English (another, more cultural kind of invasion, along with the film’s principal cinematic reference points), the coda includes the first appearance of the Finnish language, and sees our solitary, self-driven hero finally discovering national solidarity. It is a peculiar odyssey: for here home is not just where the heart is, but something fleetly mobile and able to be reconstructed anywhere.