Sisu **

REVIEW:

Sisu is not very good. The trailers make it look like it will be an all out, crazy action-fest movie about vengeance and kicking ass, and killing a whole lot of Nazis. It makes it look like the movie will be John Wick meets Inglorious Basterds, with a B level story, but A level action. Turns out the action isn’t all that special, and the story is even weaker than one might expect. The basic story is that this man finds gold, has it stolen from him by Nazis, and spends the rest of the movie fighting the Nazis. Now, we don’t really need any more in the ways of story than that, so long as the action is great, with maybe some humor mixed in too. Only we don’t get those things here.

First off, there’s really no humor. If you think about Grindhouse movies or Seventies Blaxploitation or any B level action movie, humor is a key part of it. But even worse, the action isn’t all that good. Especially considering that again and again the unbelievable and unrealistic threshold is crossed without any explanation. The first time this happens is when the Nazis fire off machine guns at our hero, and he simply lifts up a land mine to use as a shield, somehow deflecting and blocking and stopping every bullet. Another one of those unbelievable moments comes when he’s underwater and kills Nazis underwater only to bite into their necks and suck out their oxygen so that he can use it to continue breathing underwater. And a third unbelievable moment comes when he’s hanging from a noose, and somehow uses a rusty nail dug into the side of his leg to keep balance so that he doesn’t die. It’s all way too ridiculous. It’s fine that this movie had a bare bones, very basic plot, but then it needed to have solid action. Like ideas that we’ve never seen before, and that made sense, and were also pretty cool. This movie did not have those things.