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‘Sisu’ Review: Sweat Wicking
A seemingly invincible former commando goes on a rampage in this blandly gratuitous World War II action movie.
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By Calum Marsh
With “Sisu,” the John Wickification of action movies continues. This brisk, bloody World War II shoot-‘em-up follows the graphic rampage of a taciturn countryside gold prospector and former commando (Jorma Tommila) who, according to local legend, lost his family in a massacre and so “became a ruthless, vengeful soldier,” a “one-man death squad” with more than 300 confirmed kills to his name. Brutal and efficient, our grizzled hero has the blithe, stolid invulnerability of a video game character, dismembering limbs, snapping necks and patching up his own wounds without breaking a sweat.
“Sisu,” written and directed by the Finnish filmmaker Jalmari Helander, is the kind of thriller that’s usually described as “lean.” The setup is austere: During the final stretch of the war, a retreating Nazi platoon happens upon our solitary hero in the barren fields of Finland and steals his gold. They try to kill him. He gets away. The rest of the movie is about him trying to get the gold back. Nazi soldiers are shot, stabbed, crushed, impaled, decapitated, run over and blown up, images that the movie displays with grindhouse glee. You wince to imagine the film’s budget for pyrotechnics and blood effects.
To a certain type of viewer, 90 minutes of Nazi-killing violence may be inherently attractive. And “Sisu” feels designed with an audience’s fervent enthusiasm in mind: It seems to pause for applause after its most gratuitous kills. But 90 minutes of over-the-top mayhem means very little if the mayhem hasn’t been conceived with much wit or imagination, and what prevents “Sisu” from hitting the kinetic stride of a great exploitation flick is a style that feels pedestrian and oddly reserved.
For all its gung-ho violence, the film never feels fraught or nasty enough: It never risks true offense or tastelessness, never takes a gamble on anything that could be interpreted the wrong way or that might sidestep expectations. Somehow it makes killing Nazis feel pretty tame. Take for instance the hero’s dog. It’s a cute hound. Improbably, it manages to avoid harm. It’s not that the movie would be better if the dog died — but it is characteristic of the film to spare the audience the potential discomfort of seeing the consequences of all this violence fall onto anything other than nameless Nazis.
There’s something vaguely feeble about this cautious approach to what is ostensibly an unapologetic gore fest. By the time a liberated band of young female prisoners takes up arms against Nazi captors and blasts them to smithereens — the enemy’s fate never for a moment having been cast in doubt, the prisoners’ victory preordained — you will probably feel exhausted. This moment, like so much of the film, is expressly designed to make you hoot and holler. You’re more likely to groan and cringe.
Sisu Rated R for gruesome carnage, over-the-top mutilation, dismemberment and some strong language. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters.
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‘Sisu’ Is the Bloody, Nazi-Killing Movie You Need to See
By David Fear
The thing about Nazis is: Fuck those guys .
Finland began World War II by fighting off the Soviet forces that tried to invade the country in the “Winter War ” from 1939 to 1940. They were conscripted by the Axis powers to fight alongside Hitler’s army until 1944, the year of the Moscow Armistice — that treaty not only allied Finnish troops with the Russians, it started a major campaign that sought to drive the Nazis out of the country once and for all. This was known as the “Lapland War,” for those of you playing along at home.
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It’s not long before he runs into a gaggle of Nazis, led by a leather-duster-wearing commander ( The Martian ’s Aksel Hennie). They let the prospector pass unharmed, knowing that he’s about to run into another patrol further down the road. Let those guys tale care of him, the officer says. Sure enough, the man runs into a second group of soldiers. They figure they’ll shoot him and claim his loot for themselves. The prospector has another idea: How about he sticks a giant knife through one of their skulls, uses several troops as a human shield against machine-gun fire, then blows the entire top of the last guy’s head clean off?
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That’s a vast understatement, and the majority of Helander’s glorious bastard of a war epic pivots between putting Korpi through all sorts of bodily injury (he’s shot, hung, set on fire, nearly drowned, and takes a grenade to the chest) and letting this superhuman killing machine go full-blown Terminator on his enemies. All Der Führer ’s tanks and all Der Führer ‘s men can’t keep this ex-commander from tearing them limb from limb again. Or from throwing landmines at their heads. Or from slitting their throats, sticking his pickax in their sternum, or attaching them to a plummeting megaton bomb. Once those aforementioned female prisoners get in on the Nazi-slaughtering action as well, all bets are off.
Sisu is beyond cartoonish in terms of its ultraviolence, which becomes more of an end and less of a means before the final villain gets his righteous comeuppance. It’s also so ludicrous, and almost infectiously gleeful in its near-biblical anti-Nazi bloodlust, that you can feel yourself giving in to the anything-goes state of mind — and sticking around just to see the creative ways the movie figures out to destroy these racist degenerates next. If screen carnage isn’t your jam, you can let this good-versus-evil splatterfest pass. For those of us who’ve spent way too much time pining for white supremacists to suffer the consequences of their actions and their prejudices, however, the only question we have for Sisu is: Where were you five years ago?
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