If you haven’t seen the delightfully demented Sisu yet, then that’s something to be rectified immediately, because it’s hands-down the best action movie of the year bar none.
Yes, John Wick: Chapter 4 is included in that conversation, but writer and director Jalmari Helander’s World War II shoot, stab, throttle, bludgeon, pulverize, and beat ’em up wins for the sole reason that it was made for roughly 10 percent of the cost and is twice as inventive as Keanu Reeves’ latest outing as the sharp-suited assassin, which is saying something.
Much like a Wick flick, the plot is incredibly simple, too. A bunch of Nazis roaming the countryside get on the wrong side of Jorma Tommila’s exiled former commando, and he decides to dismantle and dismember them in the goriest fashion possible. That’s all there is to it, but Helander nonetheless took the time to explain to Total Film how he set about making an instant all-timer on a shoestring budget.
“I didn’t have a $100 million budget to make this film but what I did have is my imagination, so I tried to be inventive with what he does and how he basically kills Nazis and survives. It’s one of the key factors that will make it stand out in the action genre, it has a different kind of approach. This is the first time I didn’t think about anything like that. I went full steam ahead with everything that came to my head and I was lucky that no one told me what to do or asked me to cut something out.”
It is satisfying but it’s also hard as we have seen millions of kills in movies, so it was about trying to figure out something you haven’t seen before. But it is satisfying when the idea finally comes and usually that doesn’t happen when I’m writing, almost never. The idea always comes after the writing when I’m doing something else, it suddenly it crops up. You can’t force it – if it’s going to happen it will happen.”
Oh, it happens, make no mistake about it. At a lean, mean, and visceral 91 minutes, Sisu is an hour of your life you won’t regret spending, fitting double the demented glee of murder and mayhem that you’ll find in a John Wick adventure into half the running time.
