Do you like movies with gratuitous violence where the main character absorbs an inhuman amount of damage? Me too. Movies with pretty much no plot and zero romance but with scenes where there’s lots of clever ways to kill bad guys? If yes to all, then you should see this one. Also, it’s Finnish which is cool. How often do you watch Finnish action movies? This one builds upon some John Wick era type action starring a protagonist reminiscent of Marv from Frank Miller’s Sin City but combines Tarantino era bloodshed sprinkled with a dash of good old spaghetti western style.

It took me two goddam weeks to finish this movie. Try having kids sometime and see how much of your former, fun life gets sucked away and replaced with trips to the park and watching lots, and I mean lots, of Disney channel. I lovingly call it “joyous misery.” Yes, kids are fun as hell, it’s in our DNA to produce the little fuckers, it helps us grow up, but good luck having any adult fun for a long time once they’re born. Think of it as a totem pole where each of your favorite activities are stacked upon one another. As your child grows older each one of these items of interest and enjoyment are lopped off the top. Think of it as metaphor–The beheading of your former, immature self. The growth of your new, exhausted, broke, and somehow happy in the face of all this change self. Just like the hydra of Greek myth, two heads grow back where there should be a bloody stump–one fun, one horrible. One of the first in the hierarchy of fun to go are adult Movies. You’re not going out to a theater with a two year old. You’ve got to wait until they’re four or so and unless you’re a terrible parent you’re not watching anything so enjoyingly über gory like Sisu, a movie that would give a child serious trauma, maybe even turn then into a serial killer or at the least have them in a chair spending beaucoup ducats talking to a trained professional later in life about how his father took him to see badass action flicks.

I love shit like this. Action movies these days are pretty few and far between in terms of entertainment value. The cool thing about Sisu is that although it follows a prescription (the tough unkillable hero), it is still watchable. We know, at the end, our boy will be triumphant. I mean, every movie like this follows the same formula but we haven’t grown tired of it yet, have we?

And there’s even a cool mythological presence touched on ingrained if you listen closely enough. The Russian bad guys conjure the name, Koschei the Deathless, an immortal villain present in Russian Folklore straight from children’s fairy tales. An evil, mischievous spirit of sorts who often harassed maidens and could only be killed by finding his heart. Of course the heart was commonly hidden away inside an egg, that was inside a duck, that was inside a rabbit, that was inside a hawk, that was inside a buried chest, and so on and so forth. Anyway, it’s worth a deeper dive if you’re into these sort of things.

Listen close now, people these days are too critically harsh of certain genres. Point in fact: Star Wars fans. I’m not going to a Star Wars movie and expecting much except for some lightsaber swashbuckling and cool space CGI effects. It’s not going to have good writing and the plot will be terrible. If I want something deep I’ll just watch a couple three hanky movies like Manchester by the Sea or Rudy. We watch action movies because they laugh at mortality. The good ones do anyway. There’s some reason why the main dude goes on a hell bent tear. None of it is realistic. The bad guys never kill the good guy when they have the opportunity. Yada, yada. That’s not what we’re here for. We’re actually here to be taken away. If you haven’t forgotten, it’s entertainment. We gravitate toward certain movies for what they give us. Sisu is nice because it helps me forget, for an hour and a half, that I’m responsible for my entire family’s well being and if I falter, even a moment, they’ll suffer and I’ll be a bad father. Yes, in this day and age of insanity we need to be whisked away every so often to faraway lands where old guys with beards find exciting ways to kill Russian soldiers.