How Finnish action film Sisu sums up our golden movie moment
Nicholas Clairmont
For now, it is impossible to know what the citizens of the future will mean when they talk about “2020s movies.” The eye cannot see itself, and the present cannot have historical perspective on its own culture. But I have a few guesses about what the moment we’re in will eventually be remembered for. This will be a nadir for music, literature, and a handful of other dying arts, but also a renaissance age for one of the great rituals of American mass catharsis: the ass-kicking action film.
Comedy films died in the 2020s as a popular art form. “What a weird period it was,” they’ll say, “when they were afraid to laugh.” But we were not completely shot through with artistic cowardice back in the 2020s. They will admire us for our action movies. I’m sure of this because I just saw the ambitious, fun, confident, and shocking Nazi-killin’ masterpiece Sisu, released April 28.
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The ‘80s had bulging forearms with popping veins, like the ones Arnold wielded in Predator or Bruce rocked in Die Hard — not to mention Sly Stallone, Jean-Claude van Damme, or Dolph Lundgren. Today, our action hero looks like a moderately fit father who just dropped his child off at college and maybe put off a haircut for a few too many weeks but who is actually more dangerous for being exhausted and beaten down because his very exhaustion fuels his resolve. He is covered in the blood of the men he just killed, each of whom got a solid shot at his face before going down. He is a reluctant hero. He’s got to do what he’s got to do.
More serious stakes for more reluctantly violent men allow the violence that is portrayed to be, ultimately, way more rad. And the filmmakers have risen to the occasion. In other words, the action itself is better than ever. The most flat-out exciting action film ever released before Sisu was released on March 24. It was called John Wick: Chapter 4, the final film about the titular character’s quest to avenge his dead wife and dog. For the fourth entry, the idea was that the first scene should outdo whatever was the most intense action sequence previously made (the long nuclear-bomb-defusal-slash-helicopter-chase climax scene of 2018’s Mission Impossible: Fallout, probably), and things should then escalate by a large step in every ensuing scene for three hours.
It succeeds. Keanu Reeves, now 58, takes hit after hit. He is stabbed. He is shot. He is thrown off a mezzanine. He falls down exactly 220 stairs, then battles his way to their summit. Watching an older guy take great punishment that doesn’t fell him is the action film calling card of our age.
Something about the character’s apparent weakness and exhaustion encourages the filmmakers to go all-in on supernatural fighting abilities and violence, as if they really have to keep convincing us (and themselves) of the hero’s powers. Stallone’s iconic John Rambo, wielding a 10-inch knife, an M60 machine gun, and an RPG-7, killed exactly one person in 1982’s First Blood. John Wick kills 140 people in John Wick 4.
So, Sisu. We’re in 1944 in Finnish Lapland. Our hero, Aatami Korpi, has lost his family, and his country has been invaded from both sides by Russians and Germans for the past five years. After years of fighting as a “one-man death squad,” the most feared soldier in Finland’s fearsome army, he has removed himself to the barren wilderness to dig the land and pan the river for gold, alone except for a chipper and well-trained dog. (The parallels to John Wick appear to be intentional.)
In a long and beautiful wordless opening sequence that recalls the Tom Waits-starring vignette from the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, you watch him live a day as a prospector in nature. You wouldn’t know he was in Europe in World War II until you see him watch the fighter planes pass low overhead. One day, as the retreating Nazis are burning and looting and killing their way home, he finds a huge pocket of gold.
He sets off to deposit the gold at the nearest bank, over 500 war-torn miles away, but he and his horse and his dog happen past some Nazis. When they stop him, taking shots at his dog and trying to kill him for his treasure, the taciturn Finn has to put a knife through one of their skulls. And we’re off. End bucolic nature shots, enter gunslinger. Aatami is going to kill those Nazis.
Our hero survives more than John Wick’s mere gunshots and three-story falls. He survives a walk through a minefield and a plane crash. He survives being hanged, set on fire, and being forced underwater for 10 minutes (he slits the throats of pursuing Nazis and inhales the air from their lungs). No wonder the Soviets he used to hunt nicknamed him “the immortal.” But according to one of the girls the Nazis keep as sex slaves, “He’s not immortal. He just refuses to die.” That refusal is “sisu,” the impossible-to-translate Finnish national virtue that means something like stoic determination.
Nazis, sex slaves, extreme gore: Does this all make this movie sound dark? It is not. It’s a feel-good romp. Because it’s so well done and because it’s committed against Nazis, the viscerally believable violence is somehow also Bugs Bunny-like fun. When our hero takes a hit, you wince, yet when a mine flies through the air and explodes a Nazi minion into a red mist, you laugh.
If subterranean messages about what makes for a real man in pop culture have fled to the action genre, so too have jokes. As of this writing, while rom-coms stream regularly and there are great jokes delivered in sci-fi and fantasy releases — think Guardians of the Galaxy — no comedy film as such is even out in theaters in wide release, or will be for some time. The next straightforward comedy on the calendar (No Hard Feelings, starring Jennifer Lawrence) will be released in a month and a half. The culture writers of the near future will almost certainly remember us for having not had almost any tentpole comedies, and few comedies of any kind whatsoever. And for, even more weirdly, having not noticed that in real time. What is the Dodgeball or The Hangover or Wedding Crashers of, say, last year, 2022? In the 2020s, if you want to laugh, you’re probably buying a ticket for a movie where people get shot.
Which, again, brings us back to Sisu. A lot of influences go into preparing you to process Sisu, a graphic, gory, foreign film set in a Nazi-occupied Eastern European country, as something at the lighter end of dark comedy. Any Finnish movie (even in English) would have been an unlikely wide U.S. release just a few years ago, but in the age of Squid Game and Money Heist, American audiences know foreign films do not equal boring arthouse fare. Cathartic rewriting of World War II history with spaghetti Western themes? That’s Inglourious Basterds, with a dash of True Grit. A retired trained killer who gets back in the game when a gang harms his pet? John Wick, yes, but the trope runs deeper. Tony Jaa, heir to Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan as the best martial arts action star of his generation, starred in 2005’s The Protector, about a man who takes on a criminal syndicate who stole the elephant he is sworn to watch over. By the climax, when a panting Jaa finds his elephant killed for its bones, he has broken a thousand limbs. Maybe the trained killer with a beloved animal is an archetypal reminder to the modern audience that a violent man and a caring man aren’t always two different people, at least if he uses it to protect the innocent.
The end of Sisu somehow evokes Philip Roth’s immortal 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint about the nature of American male Jewish neuroticism. The titular Portnoy finally finishes retelling the entire story of his humiliating life for several hundred pages, and the gag is that this was all the set up to a joke in which the punchline is the book’s last line: Spielvogel, Portnoy’s therapist, has been listening to him unload. He replies, “Now vee may perhaps to begin.” In Sisu, Aatami, quite unlike Portnoy, doesn’t talk for the entire duration. But after two hours of some of the best action sequences you’ve ever seen (I saw this movie with my mother, and 40 minutes in, she had to leave when her Apple watch told her she had a dangerously high heart rate), it ends on a similarly existential punchline.
All of these cultural threads twist together into the bloody rope that is Sisu, which, though it is not a piece of great or maybe even good art, is a fantastic action movie. Gratuitously violent, fundamentally anti-violence, and thrillingly choreographed, I think it may be remembered as the quintessential 2020s movie. It’s so good, it makes me think action movies are what 2020s movies will be known for. We just may be living in a golden age.
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Nicholas Clairmont is the Life and Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.