Sisu Review (2023)

Sisu is like almost an arthouse B movie where there is enough gore delivered in a way that is so creative you might laugh like a maniac when you see it like I did in the second chapter where he encounters the first of the Nazis who are bound to chase him and not leave him alone, and he too, despite what happens keeps coming back and back and back despite suffering from a landmine blow up, bullets in leg, face being slashed and literally everything imaginable including escaping from a hung rope by having his wound be the balance for the entire structure on which he has been hung; but he never gives up, just like the film which relentlessly throws us wide images of the desolate Finnish land which has been ravaged by the Nazis and in the process tries to find beauty in a wasteland while also simultaneously giving us juicy and gory deaths of Nazis killed with knives, guns, landmines and a goddamn rocket but still the action sequences could have been more or I expected a bit more action which could have been because I was misled by the trailer into thinking it’d be basically John Wick but in a Nazi time period; however the director instead gives us a lot of build-up and suspense scenes on how the lead “Sisu” i.e. Aatami Korpi survives the various onslaughts of attacks that the Nazi throw at him including one bonkers scene where he inhales O2 from the throat of a dead man whom he killed but the reason I call it arthouse is not because this is some profound film about deeper ideas or something but because it is slow paced in its action while being fast paced in the overall narrative which flies by; the action are captured in clunky handheld-esque cameras which are not as slick as the action that we see in the John Wick movies but something that entertains us more by virtue of the extremely over the top nature of the few kills the lead does and the extremely creative ways he does those in but the moments where we get dialogue especially from a Finnish woman who is captured, talking about Aatami Korpi and his legend diluted the mood of the film by becoming unnecessarily expository despite the fact that we already got a similar monologue between the Nazis in the earlier portions of the film but other than that Sisu is an absolutely fun and gory ride that impresses you with the quality of gore rather than the quantity.