Discovering Sisu the other week threw up a big red flag for me. The trailer was released, and I found myself checking it out almost immediately, but plastered across its promotional material was mentions of John Wick producers. When a film advertises itself based on the success of a completely different film, it doesn't exactly boost confidence I have that it could be worth watching. Though, from what I saw in the trailer, it also looked as if it was pulling that John Wick hype from the grave by implying that this narrative would also follow the idea that a tough-guy independent warrior type has people trying to harm his dog. The trailer implies something does actually happen to his dog and that it calls for action from our protagonist. The film is nothing like this, however. Sisu, instead, is just heavily exaggerated gore for a feature length runtime with very little narrative to it. As you can already tell, the somewhat misleading trailer didn't stop me from still watching the film, but already I feel like I should say that it just did not really do anything for me.
In today's weird political climate, it seems that Sisu has been heavily praised by critics who, to my own discovery, had been celebrating the film for the fact that it takes place in World War 2's final days, with Nazi soldiers being absolutely obliterated in many creative and gory methods throughout the film. It seems to me that the high ratings Sisu has received comes purely from a place of the critics themselves having built-up anger and the assumption that everyone they disagree with is some evil Nazi, and that watching a film of Nazi soldiers being killed over and over is somewhat justification for their own extreme thoughts and wants. This may seem drastic for me to say, but having a glance over the reviews over on Rotten Tomatoes, this is precisely what seems to be the case: the politically fueled far left type making odd connections to reality through fiction. Now, usually I keep politics far away from me, but I couldn't help but notice that the main reasons for praising Sisu stemmed from the critics' own political beliefs. Not based on the quality of the film itself. Would you rate Saving Private Ryan a 5/5 purely because it shows Nazi soldiers dying? It'd be weird, right?
This isn't to say that Sisu is a bad film and only receives praise from forever-online-politics-addicted psychopaths, but that the positives are most certainly inflated beyond what is deserved. For the most part, Sisu is barely a film. It resembles the worst of the Rambo franchise while perhaps doing things is a bit more visually appealing. Still riddled with nonsensical moments that'll cause you to roll your eyes.
Sisu
To say Sisu really has a narrative is a bit of a stretch. The main idea behind this film is that a gold miner roaming Finland comes across a group of comically evil Nazis which aim to steal his gold once they discover it. Fully aware that the Nazis are losing the war and that the final days are approaching, they take it upon themselves to push forward and try to obtain the gold from him at all costs. What ensues is an absolute bloodbath of violence as our protagonist appears to be impossible to kill. Picking off soldiers one-by-one in creative manners with none of them really having any identity or awareness of what's happening. These characters are comically evil and stupid, which I felt kind of removed some of the weight from them and didn't make them seem all that threatening in the first place. With our protagonist performing such insane stunts, it seemed like the tension was just never really there. At no point did it seem like he might not have the upper hand, or that those effectively hunting him had any intelligence as to how to go about it.
I couldn't help but find myself a bit bored of this approach. I felt like I needed some story, a break from the violence to perhaps establish a bit more depth to the characters or introduce some real weight to the narrative. Despite the Nazi soldiers knowing the war is being lost, they themselves didn't really display any fear, even when their friends beside them suddenly explode into red mist. With all this chaos taking place, the pacing just seems a bit off, as everything takes place immediately and doesn't give you much room to digest it all. The downside to this again is that it sort of plays all its cards quite early on, to which the later action just doesn't impress as much, and instead has to take itself to new, more unbelievable heights. Even then, as it tries to divert some of the attention away from our invincible protagonist, it instead just introduces new irrelevant characters that don't really serve any impact on things. All circling back to that main problem: there's just no reason to really care about anyone.
This is also interesting given the film's approach to splitting itself up into chapters, giving each chapter a name and sort of presenting itself up in this manner. Even though each chapter doesn't really have any difference to the prior in terms of visuals or pacing.
Despite this, I do have to admit that the action scenes were done with some quality. The special effects and choreography of some moments are quite good, and it definitely is inspired by some of those prior action films that go all-out on the visuals, giving you that more blockbuster appeal. Though when it came to the gunfights, I couldn't help but remember the Stormtrooper problem: nobody can aim! Everyone misses by a mile! It seems that when something does happen to our protagonist, it's almost an accident and not at the hands of those hunting him down. So all the fun action moments are more on the side of the Nazis getting utterly destroyed in various sequences, rather than the fight having any sort of mutual weight. At times it just seemed like the plot was bending far too much on the side of our protagonist as a result, when guns started firing, you just knew nothing was going to land, no matter the size of the gun, whether it's a rifle or autocannon firing off massive rounds that just end up eaten by the corpose our protagonist uses as a literal meat shield.
It is hard to not come across as if I'm talking overly negative about Sisu, because I did enjoy it. I just think it was incredibly weak where it definitely had potential to be better. And these areas of weakness were just far too bothering to ignore. Whether it was through some of the dialogue, or the just utterly stupid actions on everyone's part. It seemed to be hugging tightly to the script which struggled to offer anything beyond action and plot magic, and that rarely translates well into visuals. In regards to visuals, I think it could've been better at directing this unstoppable force of a protagonist. Some cinematography of different perspectives to convey the seriousness of his motivation perhaps; I really didn't feel that at any point. That said, it's still more visually interesting than most modern films. Some nice colour grading and earthly tones to display the scorched Earth approach.
