‘Sisu’ Review: If John Wick Were Finnish

Sisu—sometimes said to be the Finns’ favorite word and one with no exact English equivalent (“gutsy” and “tenacious” are in the ballpark)—defines the character of a lone commando turned prospector named Aatami (played with an iron brow by Jorma Tommila ) who strikes gold on the plains of remote northern Finland in late 1944, when German troops there are in the process of withdrawing to occupied Norway. The SS men in the film, however, fully expect to lose the war and to be hanged afterward, so they’re in an even more ruthless mood than usual. When they come across Aatami, a feeble-looking oldster on horseback, they resolve to steal his gold in hopes of using it to escape justice later on. If he appears to be an ordinary graybeard in his 60s, however, the scars all over his torso tell a story of a certain resolve. Soon Lapland is being watered with gallons of German blood.

Writer-director Jalmari Helander is after nothing more ambitious than re-creating the feel of a ridiculously violent drive-in movie, with Aatami a successor to the nearly silent wandering gunfighter portrayed by Clint Eastwood on many occasions. There is barely any narrative, just one scene after another of Aatami out-fighting, outsmarting, outlasting or (several times) just lucking out against the increasingly confused and terrified German soldiers.

Not that Aatami escapes all harm. Without so much as an Advil, he digs out shrapnel with a blade, sews himself up with a hook, cauterizes wounds with a lighted match and disinfects gashes by pouring gasoline on them. The man is like a field medic who is also his own patient.

Though the self-care segments might be the most trying parts to watch, fans of gory slaughter have plenty to savor. A small group of Finnish women being kept as sex slaves by the Nazis helpfully explain what’s happening. “This isn’t about who is the strongest. This is about not giving up,” one of them ( Mimosa Willamo ) explains to her captors. Yes, but it’s mainly about being so good at killing that battle-forged Nazis might as well be dandelions. So bloody is Aatami’s handiwork that at one point a pair of armed soldiers speed up to him on a motorcycle, get off of their vehicle, and run away. When Aatami chases after an airplane about to take off, runs out of bullets and finds himself armed only with a pickax, you’ll feel sorry for the plane.

It’s all loony, cartoony fun, if you can picture the kind of cartoon in which people get knives thrust completely through their heads or a body gets reduced to its constituent blobs after Aatami lobs a land mine at it. The film does have a somewhat cheap look (the Finnish film industry is not overly awash in funding), having approximately the production values of an American TV commercial, but then again digital effects have gotten so advanced that even the bargain-rack versions of them are impressive compared to the offerings in big-budget movies 40 years ago.

In its arch appreciation for pre-digital genre movies that reveled in juicy violence, “Sisu” calls to mind not only Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns but also the films of Quentin Tarantino. It is not, however, anything like a competitor to such works as “Inglourious Basterds.” Mr. Helander’s script is notably lacking in sparkling, or even original, dialogue. An even more glaring flaw is that it fails to breathe life into the villains. The chief antagonist, a senior SS officer ( Aksel Hennie ), should be as charismatic as the hero, in the opposite moral direction, but instead he’s merely a garden-variety brute with no memorable dialogue and no characteristics worth noting. His henchmen, meanwhile, are woefully incompetent. Again and again, they miss Aatami despite firing at close range, or prove unequal to elementary tasks such as getting their pistols out of their holsters in a few seconds. Villains who aren’t good at their jobs are a bit boring, and despite their menacing regalia these Nazis are effectively lambs to the slaughter. “Sisu” is simply the slaughterhouse Mr. Helander has built around them, with all of the narrative and thematic artistry that implies.