I got a huge kick out of Finnish director Jalmari Helander’s Yuletide creature feature Rare Exports when we watched it for a Movie of the Month discussion a few years back.  It has a morbid sense of humor and a willingness to go there when tormenting wayward children that’s missing in most modern echoes of traditional fairy tales.  However, I did get hung up on how overtly macho the film felt for a folk tale, writing “This is a weirdly masculine movie.  The central relationships between a boy and his single father, a boy and his bully/bestie, and a boy and his Christmas demon are all variances of masculine bonding or masculine conflict.  In fact, I don’t recall there being a single female character represented onscreen.”  I had somehow forgotten that aspect of Helander’s debut by the time I borrowed his English-language breakout from the library last month, but it came roaring back in an instant as soon as I pressed play.  It turns out Helander’s just as much of a consistently meatheaded director as David Ayer, S. Craig Zahler, or Michael Bay – a perspective that felt like a weird fit for the material when he was making a modern-day fairy tale about a Christmas demon but is perfectly suited for a shoot-em-up action cheapie about a one-man army.  In Rare Exports, Helander’s ultra-masc roid rage sensibilities were a total surprise; in Sisu, they’re par for the course.

The term “sisu” is helpfully translated in an opening title card as a Finnish word for “a white-knuckle form of courage and unimaginable determination.”  That cultural concept is personified by a defected Finnish commando (Jorma Tommila), described by his enemies as an “immortal” “one-man death squad.”  Fed up with the international politics and personal tragedies of WWII, he’s reinvented himself as an independent gold prospector.  His new solemn, solitary life is interrupted by a small band of Nazis enacting a “scorched Earth policy” on the land where he discovers his first goldmine.  When the Nazis attempt to steal that gold directly out of his pockets, he fights back with unimaginable fury, systematically destroying each of their blood-sack bodies and, as lagniappe, setting their sex-slave prisoners free in the process.  He goes about his work of killing the offending Nazis with the stoic silence of classic, rugged masculinity, acting as if he owes Brad Pitt one hundred Nazi scalps the same way a steel mill worker owes the punch-clock eight hours of repetitive labor.  The movie sticks to a consistent, predictable rhythm as a result, even if that rhythm is frequently punctuated by stabs, gunshots, and explosions.  I’d call it the old-man version of John Wick if it weren’t for the fact that Liam Neeson was already making old-man John Wicks before there was a John Wick around to riff on.

There are more women onscreen in Sisu than there are in Rare Exports, but they’re mostly props.  They start the film as captive rape victims for the Nazi scum, then are eventually set free to transform into an entirely different macho trope: chicks with guns.  In Sisu, women are victims, dogs are target practice, and men are wordless murder machines with an equal deficit of interior life.  The results are reasonably entertaining for a grotesque slapstick actioner that’s just out to crush 90 Nazi skulls in 90 minutes or less or your pizza’s free.  As soon as its English narration track and faux-vintage chapter titles hit in the opening seconds, my standards for it to succeed plummeted to DTV action levels, and the movie seemed complacent to meet me there.  If Helander’s going to stick around in the cultural zeitgeist, I do think his macho sensibilities and delight in over-the-top action choreography would be perfectly suited for direct-to-streaming action novelties.  In an interview extra on my library’s DVD, he openly admits to the limitations of his aesthetic, explaining, “I’m pretty certain you will never see me doing a film which happens in a kitchen where husband and wife are arguing about some stupid shit.  To me, you have to have big adventure.”  In other words, he’s fully committed to the cause of meathead cinema and, thus, restricted to the payoffs & shortcomings therein.

-Brandon Ledet