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Sisu Movie Review

Sisu is a 2023 Finnish war action film directed by Jalmari Helander and starring Jorma Tommila. It’s a well made movie technically speaking, but it is intended to the lowest common denominator.

During the last days of World War II, a solitary prospector crosses paths with Nazis on a scorched-earth retreat in northern Finland. When the soldiers decide to steal his gold, they quickly discover they just tangled with no ordinary miner. First off, I am definitely not a fan of Jalmari Helander. This Finnish filmmaker previously directed ‘Rare Exports’, which is better than this flick, but not by much. He makes films that are overly Americanized and lacking in culturally unique elements from his home country.

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That universal appeal was highly evident in Sisu, a film that was made to appeal to worldwide audiences, but especially to the US viewers. Not only is the dialogue almost entirely in English, which was clearly a move to appeal to lazy American audiences that don’t want to read subtitles, but there isn’t a lot of dialogue in this film either.

The protagonist barely speaks a word in this movie, which made this flick a rip-off of ‘John Wick’. He doesn’t get to have any meaningful arc or backstory, thus I could care less whether he survived or not. Others fared even worse as the Nazis are your just standard over-the-top villains.

What appealed to me in Sisu is the Finnish setting as Lapland looks gorgeous and it’s very well incorporated into the action on screen, which is exhilarating at first, but it becomes frustratingly overwhelming very quickly. For action aficionados, this movie is bound to hit home as the action scenes are well executed and quite thrilling at times, but to me they were too gory and at times even one-note. This is no Tarantino movie as it lacked the fun factor of his films. The cinematography and score are strong, but the plot is non-existent and the second half was quite tiresome.

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