Superheroes used to stand for something admirable, like truth, justice and the American way.  In Finland, they still do.  Sisu roughly means stoic determination, grit, resilience, and hardiness in the face of adversity.

The character has a name, but nobody uses it.  There is very little dialogue.  He’s just a guy that wants to be left alone, so don’t call him a hero.  I’ll just call him the guy.

During WW II, the guy had fought and suffered, so now he wanted to just mine for gold in the bleak wilderness of Northern Finland, and be left alone.  He hits pay dirt.

As he is taking his gold to town, he encounters some inquisitive German soldiers who are on their way out of Finland.  Before it gets rough, he sends his dog away to safety.  I don’t know why his dog looks like a sheep, but maybe that’s popular in Finland.

The Germans want his gold, so he kills all of them.  He starts with his knife and pickaxe, but ends up with all of their stuff. 

At times, it gets outlandish.  One German almost gets away with his gold, so he buries his pickaxe into the belly of their plane as it’s taking off, then he climbs in through the landing gear compartment.

The guy gets the shit beat out of him all the time, but he is relentless. 

There is almost no dialogue, because the plot is easy to understand.  The action is creative and occasionally ridiculous, but he’s killing greedy Nazis, so it’s fun.

Sisu:  The Road to Revenge, the Germans are gone.  To end the war, Finland lost a chunk of land to the Soviets.  Finns in that region were relocated to other parts of Finland.

That sucks for the guy, but whatever.  All he wants to do is take timbers from his home in the surrendered region, and rebuild it somewhere else in Finland.  The Soviets are okay with that too, and let the guy into the Soviet region with his truck.  When the Soviets realize that the guy had killed like 300 Soviet soldiers when they burned down his village, they try to kill him off.

The guy only has a truck filled with lumber, but he is effective one-man army.  A Soviet fighter pilot intends to eject just before crashing his plane into the guy’s truck, but the guy stops real quick so a few timbers slide forward to make a ramp to direct the plane over his head. 

Eventually, he has to abandon the truck, so he piles all the timber onto a Soviet tank he finds.  His intent is to crash the border into Finland.  Just before the confrontation, he releases is dog, and sends across the border.  It’s nice that they make sure we know that the dog makes it.

Even though the dog was safe, a bunch of other stuff happened because the Soviets wanted to take him to Siberia and desecrate his timber.  Or something.  The guy was being tortured on a train, with his timber, so he kills a whole bunch of Soviets and gets his lumber across the border.

The guy gets to build his new house, and a bunch of people come to help because he’s a war hero.

The major theme was a good one.