Sisu: Road to Revenge Parents Guide

Sisu: Road to Revenge is Rated R by Motion Picture Rating (MPA) for strong bloody violence, gore and language.

Best suited for teens (16+) and adults. Not recommended for younger children because of the graphic violence, gore, and mature themes

From the very first moments of Sisu: Road to Revenge, you can feel writer-director Jalmari Helander winking at you. Before a single bone snaps or a drop of blood hits the snow, disgraced Soviet officer Igor Draganov (a flinty, wolf-eyed Stephen Lang) gathers his platoon of faceless Red Army thugs and mutters a warning about the man they’re hunting. Aatami Korpi Jorma Tommila again playing him as a grizzled monolith of silence is, in Draganov’s words, a “crafty bastard.” The phrasing is crude, sure, but in a strange way it doubles as Helander’s invitation to the audience: settle in, this world runs on grit and audacity, and the film itself is going to be just as tenacious as the man at its center.

And if you never caught the first Sisu a muscular, darkly funny slice of pulp that faded into the margins under Lionsgate’s handling Helander makes sure you’re not left behind. Even Screen Gems, now shepherding the sequel under the Sony umbrella, doesn’t seem to know what to do with this oddball franchise. Yet the movie opens with the same stark definition of “sisu,” almost like a thesis statement: a uniquely Finnish mix of stubborn courage, bottomless endurance, and the kind of spirit that only grows sharper when everything else is broken. Aatami embodies it so completely that he sometimes feels like a mythic wrestler who’s crawled back into the ring after being slammed onto burning metal bruised, half-dead, but absolutely unwilling to stay down.

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Does Helander push this superhuman resilience too far? Of course he does. You’ll occasionally catch yourself thinking, no one could survive that, and then the film shrugs and barrels on. But the action is staged with such crisp ingenuity Mika Orasmaa’s camera knows exactly when to squeeze in tight on Aatami’s face and when to pull out for a sweeping lateral chase shot—that the excess becomes part of the charm. The momentum never curdles into incoherence, and even with a protagonist who feels carved from impervious granite, there’s genuine tension in watching him absorb each new wound.

The story, like the first film’s, is almost disarmingly simple. With parts of Finland swallowed up by Soviet occupation, Aatami crosses the border to dismantle the family home where his loved ones were slaughtered. He loads the salvaged timber onto a Frankenstein-like war truck its engine snarling as it plows through obstacles like something out of Twisted Metal and aims to rebuild on safer ground. But legends tend to travel faster than men. Tales of the “bogeyman” who massacred Nazi soldiers have reached Soviet ears, and Draganov, newly released from imprisonment, is ordered to finish the job he botched years ago: kill the man whose family he destroyed, the man who turned vengeance into folklore.

What follows is, in spirit, a collision between old-man John Wick and Mad Max: Fury Road, a stripped-down pursuit built almost entirely out of movement and escalation. You might smile at how confidently Helander leans into the purity of the concept; sometimes a film’s backbone is so strong that all it needs to do is sprint. Each chapter introduces a new flavor of chaos motorcycle hordes in one, aerial bombardments in another and the film hardly pauses long enough for the dust to settle before Aatami is besieged again. By the time the final showdown unfolds inside and atop a speeding train, the movie has earned the right to revel in its own carnage.

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Yet calling the movie “mindless” would be selling it short. Tommila’s wordless performance holds a quiet ache, the kind of internal bruise you can sense even when his face barely moves. When you watch him hauling the beams of his ancestral home wood soaked in memory, splintered by violence you’re reminded how displacement scars the spirit. The idea of a man literally carrying his past across enemy lines is simple, yes, but undeniably evocative. It taps into questions about inheritance, about what parts of ourselves we cling to when everything familiar has been taken.

All of this is wrapped inside a 75-minute gauntlet of explosions, gunfire, and hilariously inventive ways to dispatch anonymous henchmen. That’s the film’s paradox: for all its gleeful brutality, the brief prologue and epilogue maybe three minutes each land with a surprising emotional weight. They nudge the movie from mere spectacle into something faintly elegiac, a reminder that even the wildest revenge fantasies grow from loss.

Sisu: Road to Revenge may be paved with bodies and blown-out wreckage, but Helander shapes that destruction into something oddly heartfelt. It’s a road of ruin, yes, but also one carved by persistence, memory, and a man who refuses to let his story be erased.

Detailed Content Breakdown for Parents

Violence & Intensity:
This is a very violent movie. There’s a high body count, brutal fight scenes, lots of blood, and creative but gruesome kills. The action is relentless from hand-to-hand combat to chase sequences and it’s staged very physically, with practical stunts that feel visceral and real.

Language: There’s some profanity. The MPAA rating notes “language” along with the gore. It’s not primarily a dialogue-driven character drama, but strong language does appear, fitting the tense, revenge-driven tone.

Sexual Content / Nudity: There’s no prominent mention of sexual or romantic subplots in the reviews or synopsis. The focus is squarely on action and revenge, not on relationships.

Drugs, Alcohol & Smoking: There’s no strong evidence these are central themes. Most commentary centers on war, violence, and survival, rather than on substance use.

Parental Concerns

The level of violence and gore may be too much for younger or more sensitive viewers.

The relentless intensity an extended cross-country chase, life-or-death stakes — could be emotionally draining.

Because the film leans into action spectacle rather than character relationship development, there may not be much moral or relational “resolution” beyond vengeance.

There’s little “lightness” or comic relief mentioned: this is not a feel-good family adventure, but a raw revenge thriller.