5 Reasons Why Sisu Beats Up the Competition

On April 25, I attended the Fantastic Fest advance screening of SISU. That’s when I learned that our Finnish commando turned gold miner (hereafter referred to as BAMF#1) could seize Chuck Norris by the ankles and use him to spank Arnold Schwarzenegger and send him to bed. Here are 5 supporting facts. Spoilers.

1. Makes John Rambo look like a boy scout.

To conceal his scent from a pair of German shepherds, BAMF#1 stabs a gas tank to cover himself in gasoline. When that fails, he lights himself on fire—yes, you read that correctly—to scare the dogs off. Then he jumps into a river to extinguish the flames. When divers are sent in after him, he slits their throats and swallows the air bubbles that escape from the dead men’s lungs through their open wounds to perpetually stay under water. Sure, Rambo has moves—like melding with mud walls and impossibly shooting torpedo arrows from his bow—but he never stole air bubbles from slit throats.

2. Makes John McClane look like he dies soft.

Yes, John McClane famously tapes a gun to his back and walks barefoot across glass. However, BAMF#1, when hanged to death, impales one of his bullet wounds on a loose piece of rebar to support his body weight overnight and keep himself from suffocating in the noose. He snips strands of barbed wire, weaves them through his skin, and folds them to staple shut a gut wound. Yippee-ki-yay is right. 

3: Makes John Wick look like a red belt. 

JW’s gun-fu was all the rage for years, stealing the crown from Jason Bourne’s accidental, amnesiac Krav Maga. But the new king, in the most splendorous act of overkill I’ve ever seen, snatches a fist-wound parachuter’s cord he’s being beaten with and uses it to latch the final boss to a bomb, and then drops it. The boom is very extra, and so, so satisfying. He piggybacks an enemy corpse to absorb machine gun fire as he escapes. These aren’t the drawn-out flourishes of Chinese folklore on wires. No, they’re closer to the lightning-fast, do-as-much-damage-as-possible-as-fast-as-possible exchanges of Taken, except without all the fatherly vibes.

4. Makes The Man With No Name look like a Chatty Cathy.

BAMF #1 makes it almost the entire movie without saying a thing. In fact, the biggest way I’d make this movie better would be to steal BAMF#1’s only line when he walks into the bank at the end with his recovered gold. And the only time the film monologues, it’s a beautiful woman explaining the resilience of the human spirit. “He’s not immortal; he just refuses to die.” Otherwise? Nothing. At one point, when he’s captured, the antagonist asks if BAMF#1 has any final words. Of course, he doesn’t. So many action flicks feel the need to squeeze in chains of one-liners as comedic relief to let audiences laugh off the train of gratuitous violence. Instead, BAMF#1 only has sincere non-verbal communication. When he’s escaping tank fire through a minefield, and his beloved horse is blown to smithereens, he hugs the dead horse’s neck until enemy forces arrive and then hurls a land mine at a Nazi’s helmet in vengeance. (And uses a mining pan to deflect bullets!) When he’s tired of the bloodshed and personal cost of ultraviolence, he buries his last un-stolen gold nugget. When it comes to action heroes, there’s the strong silent type, and then there’s the guy those guys have posters of on their walls.

5. Fights baddies that make Bond villains look like fainting goats.

Let’s talk about these Nazis. You’ve never seen Nazis like this. Sure, they’re an easy target. So universally accepted as pure evil that any gratuitous act of violence against them is justified, right? But these Nazis are only depicted as hyper-rational. To pass through a minefield, they tie two captured women at an interval equal to the distance between their tank treads and have them walk in front of the tank. They track BAMF#1 using his own dog because, of course his dog loves him and will want to find him, and doesn’t know what a murderous Nazi is. They want to steal his gold because they know they’re losing the war and want a way out. Dare I say, these are humanized Nazis with complexity and nuance. When they think they’ve killed BAMF#1 they remove their hats. And Sisu spares no punches. Where other film crews look to place Apple laptops to fund their features, Sisu leaves the Mercedes emblem on Nazi armored vehicles because fuck them, that’s why. 

So, there you have it: a tough, trained mountain man who keeps his mouth shut and whoops sophisticated Nazi ass. Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren wait in line for hours just to get his autograph. Journey out to your local theaters and see for yourself.