I’m always wary of movies that, before anything else, feel obligated to give us the dictionnary definition of their title. Have these filmmakers never heard of synonyms? If they’re so worried about what they perceive to be an obscure term, why didn’t they choose a more accessible word, one they feel is ‘popular’ enough to be part of what they consider to be the viewers’ obviously limited vocabularies, all along?
This would have the benefit of not insulting the audience’s intelligence right off the bat, assuming we’re too ignorant to know what the title means or too lazy to look it up ourselves if we don’t know it. How big a snob do you have to be to pick a ten-dollar word and then make change for the sake of the poor, unwashed masses? Conversely, how insecure do you have to be about your story-telling abilities? After all, the title’s intent should ideally become apparent as the movie unfolds.
Sisu might have been an exception, given that its title is a Finnish word; surely, non-Finnish speakers could benefit from a little enlightenment. Alas, this is a case where the explanation requires an explanation of its own. We’re told via an intertitle that Sisu “cannot be translated.” In the same paragraph, we learn that “It means a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination.” Uh, how is that not a translation? Perhaps a little too wordy (if you’re into the whole brevity thing), but still.
I guess what they meant is that there is no one-word equivalent in the English language — speaking of which, since this is for all intents and purposes an English-language film, why didn’t they just call it ‘Unimaginable Determination’? Or, even better, ‘White-Knuckled Courage’? Then again, that would require that writer/director Jalmari Helander not be a pompous hack. He has divided his movie into chapters, which is yet another pretentious stylistic choice (chapters are for books); moreover, he has given these chapters such redundant titles that the last one is literally called “Final Chapter.”
As for the plot, such as it is, Helander asks us to side with the ostensibly lesser of two evils. The villains are Nazis, and the (for lack of a better word) hero is a former Finnish commando. Finland, mind you, fought alongside Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1944, at which time the two countries engaged in the so-called Lapland war, in which they play-fought one another until the Soviet Union (which Finland had been at war since 1939) pressured Finland into taking a more proactive approach toward expelling Nazis from its territory (in retaliation, the Nazis adopted a scorched-earth policy, laying waste to Finnish Lapland). Essentially, the Finnish were a bunch of flip-flopping turncoats.
Accordingly, not all characters in Sisu are fascists, but pretty much everybody is a fucking asshole — and none more so than protagonist Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), a greedy, mass-murdering miser who commits a series of gruesome atrocities, as unspeakable as they are mostly physically impossible, for one reason and one reason only: to protect his gold. Aatami may be determined, but there’s nothing courageous about him; in fact, he’s no better than a goddamned leprechaun. His foes are SS scum, but as the carnage piles on, even Simon Wiesenthal would wonder, ‘is gold really worth all these lives?’
And sure, the Waffen SS platoon is destroying everything in its path as it retreats towards Norway, along the way kidnapping several Finnish women (one of whom reiterates the concept of ‘Sisu’ all over again, rendering the unnecessary opening caption even more unnecessary) — but Aatami doesn’t plan to use the gold to help his fellow countrymen who have lost their homes in the wake of the Nazis’ withdrawal, and that the captive women manage to escape during Aatami’s rampage is purely incidental (one could easily imagine him mowing these bitches down too if they showed any interest in his gold).
Between Aatami’s inhuman (and inhumane) exploits, and some embarrassingly shoddy CGI visual effects, it doesn’t take the film long to get to a point where it’s all but impossible to take anything that happens seriously — though not in an ‘it’s only movie’ sort of way, because that would imply that what we’re watching qualifies as entertainment; it’s more in a ‘fuck this movie’ kind of way. To name only one example, there’s the part where Aatami doesn’t think twice about setting himself on fire to ward off an attack dog — and while he doesn’t kill the pooch, the film definitely screws it.
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