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Review: ‘Sisu’ is a Badass Breath of Fresh Air
Jalmari Helander strikes gold with his bombastic, cartoonish action thrill ride
Sisu is a triumph. There is no point in wasting any time getting to that conclusion. What this film is able to achieve with its meagre budget of €6m (around £5m) is insane. John Wick, for example, was celebrated as a lower budget triumph for its $20m budget which allowed for one set-piece in John’s home, one at a nightclub, one explosion and fire, a couple of car crashes and a final set-piece later on. Sisu, with less than one third of John Wick’s budget, goes about one hundred times more towards the extreme.
Sisu is a wildly fun combination of a series of inspirations, an unkempt and cartoonish celebration of cinematic violence which collides with the likes of John Wick, Mad Max: Fury Road, Sergio Leone’s westerns and the giddy exploitation of a Quentin Tarantino film (minus the severely stylised dialogue that bores me). And it is a film that thrives because it knows precisely what to simplify and what to make complicated.
It is practically a silent film — one could quite easily count the number of lines or the sequences which actually include any dialogue — about a mysterious ex-soldier named Aatami (Jorma Tommila). When we meet him, he is alone in the wilderness panning a small…
