Sisu: Road to Revenge — The Ultimate Hook for Action Fans

Ed. note: This review reflects the world premiere screening of Sisu: Road to Revenge at Fantastic Fest 2025. The film opens in theaters on November 21, 2025.

Years ago a friend who worshipped The Wire used to pose an odd little test: referencing the Season 2 scene where Omar (Michael K. Williams) deliberately leaves a radiator where Bubbles (Andre Royo) can find it, he’d ask, “What would your enemies leave out to lure you?” That image — bait laid for a predictable, irresistible compulsion — kept returning to me while watching Jalmari Helander’s sequel to his lean 2022 revenge film Sisu. If you set Road to Revenge in the open, it reads like an expertly laid trap for action-movie devotees: blunt, uncompromising, and designed to provoke an immediate, delighted response.

Like its predecessor, Road to Revenge favors terse storytelling and unapologetic violence. The earlier Sisu (set in 1944) followed Aatami Korpi — played with fierce economy by Jorma Tommila — as he machine-gunned his way through a band of Nazis after they steal the gold he’d mined. The sequel relocates Aatami to 1946, where he attempts to dismantle his rural home and ferry its timbers across a newly drawn border into unoccupied Finland, now that the region has been ceded to the USSR. That plan runs headlong into the brutality of Red Army officer Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang), who’s been tasked with hunting down the man who shredded the Red Army during the Winter War. Helander’s original established the template; Road to Revenge refines it.

Draganov’s campaign of terror — which includes the slaughter of Aatami’s wife and children — gives the protagonist a personal stake, though the film needs little else to justify the ensuing bloodletting. Aatami is written in elemental strokes: a stoic survivor with a dog, a treasured photograph of his family, and a dogged resolve to protect what few possessions remain. The narrative is almost gamified, unfolding in roughly six escalating encounters that feel like progressive levels: waves of enemies come at him in ever more dangerous formations until the climactic confrontation with the chief antagonist. He speaks hardly at all; the carnage does most of the talking.

There’s a deliberately deadpan absurdity to much of the film’s violence. Aatami absorbs astonishing punishment and keeps going — an embodiment of the Finnish word “sisu,” which the film frames as an almost inhuman blend of endurance and single-minded courage. There’s also a persistent strain of inventive, improbable resourcefulness in the way he counters better-armed foes: a battered truck and raw stubbornness versus guns, explosives, motorbikes, and even aircraft. The spectacle often teeters on the edge of cartoonish excess, and Lang’s performance as the villain occasionally tips into melodrama — but that theatricality is part of the design.

The film’s spareness recalls films like the original John Wick, the loner-on-the-run ethos of First Blood, and the hard-line cool of noir-influenced shoot-’em-ups such as Point Blank. Helander has even been tapped to direct a Rambo prequel, an appointment that tracks naturally from the buttoned-down violence and mythic, unshakeable protagonist at the center of these pictures. He told Polygon during Fantastic Fest that he prefers to strip things down and let the action carry the story, and that economy is clearly evident here.

This is not a film built for nuance. It doesn’t mine trauma for psychological depth or dwell on moral ambiguity; instead it presents a blunt moral architecture: a solitary, principled man versus faceless cruelty. The pleasures the movie offers are instant and physical — the sudden thrill of an improbably staged explosion, the grotesque satisfaction of inventive kills, the quick rush that follows a brilliantly timed stunt. It’s not designed to linger in your head as much as to make your adrenaline spike and then subside.

That very specificity makes Sisu: Road to Revenge a film for a particular audience. If you prize layered character work, forensic realism, or intricate fight choreography grounded in plausible technique, this will feel shallow. If you crave escalating, unapologetic spectacle delivered with grim humor and grimier aesthetics, Helander and Tommila have crafted precisely the kind of movie that will satisfy you.

Release: Sisu: Road to Revenge opens in theaters on November 21, 2025.

Source: Polygon