I saw Sisu, starring Jorma Tommila-Man and a Junior, Big Game; Aksel Hennie-The Cloverfield Paradox, The Martian; Jack Doolan-The Boys_tv, Cemetery Junction and Mimosa Willamo-Aurora, Headfirst.

Most people that I have talked to have not even heard of this movie. Luckily, I saw a trailer for it about a month ago. The word Siso is a Finnish word that roughly translates into: Courage and unimaginable determination in the face of overwhelming odds. Jorma plays the man that has plenty of Sisu. He is a former soldier that is now a prospector, looking for-and finding-gold in northern Finland in 1944. WW2 is ending and the Nazis are retreating. Aksel is an SS officer leading his men in a retreat using a scorched earth policy of burning villages and capturing girls as souvenirs-he has about 6 so far. Jack is Aksel's next in command and Mimosa is one of the captured girls. Jorma crosses paths with Aksel and things get out of control fast. Aksel wants Jorma's gold as a retirement fund from Germany-since the war is now ending-and Jorma doesn't want to give it up. The rest is over the top action with plenty of body parts flying through the air. There is even a scene where a a Nazi soldier asks if maybe Jorma is immortal-they keep trying unsuccessfully to kill him-and Mimosa tells him, No he just refuses to die! I can see this movie becoming a cult favorite.

It's rated R for bloody violence, gore and language and has a running time of 1 hour & 31 minutes.

I really enjoyed this one and would buy it on Blu_Ray.

Finland. Such a gorgeous landscape even when war torn. It's 1944 and a rogue commander now wanders the Laplands looking for gold, oh, that precious and sweet yellow metal. The Second World War is rumbling to a noisy end, and still a reminder that it's there off in the not so far distance and occasionally it's even closer in the air overhead.

This elder and his really cool-looking dog (I want one!) search this ravaged world, just the two of them and a horse as well. Panning for riches.

This is a silent film for the first half hour or so, but where conversation may lack, the beauty of everything else on screen fills in those gaps rather nicely. (You'll think as you watch, I want to visit Finland. I want to live in Finland.) But this is the mid-1940's and there are Nazis being pushed out of the country at the moment and they are losing this war and their death-grip on this land and its' people.

This movie is told in six announced chapters. It's a gloriously short hour and a half. Tarantino's influence is heavy but more so from his Westerns than from Inglorious Basterds as one might think.

The kills are awesome. The fights are realistic and not like the choreographed dance fighting we see in most modern productions these days.

Though there is little dialogue as stated, it is told here in English and there are no subtitles.

The action sequences are breathtaking and hearten back to Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I'm serious!

This is a good story and it is timeless.

A man and his dog want to live comfortably, in peace, and be left alone.

This is one of the Best Films of 2023.

This is one of the Best Films of the 2020s.

There aren't many directors that I monitor closely, waiting and hoping for their next film to come out as soon as possible, but Jalmari Helander is one guy I keep track off. His long-feature debut "Rare Exports" was one of the most uniquely original and pleasantly deranged horror tales of the new century, and even his somewhat commercialized breakthrough "Big Game" (starring Samuel L. Jackson as the US President crashing with Air Force One in the Finnish woods) was a lot better and more entertaining than you'd think as well.

It took Helander nearly 8 years to return with a new film. At the Brussels' International Film Festival, where "Sisu" premiered and Helander was a guest of honor, he explained that he spent several years working on a personal dream project of his, but unfortunately it got cancelled entirely due to Covid. Out of pure frustration, or so he says, Helander wrote the script for "Sisu" in barely a couple of weeks. Well, if this near-brilliant explosion of action and sheer adrenalin is what he comes up with in a few weeks, then I sincerely hope he'll still get the chance to finish his other project.

What a film! You know those movies where all the great highlights and action-packed moments already feature in the trailer? "Sisu" has a terrific trailer too, but there are still a few hundreds of other highlights left to discover in the film. In fact, this film is a one-and-a-half-hour trailer full of awesome moments. The comparisons I've read between "Sisu" and Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Bastards" are accurate. The extreme violence and narrative structure are identical, and both films feature lots and lots of Nazis getting killed. Everybody just loves watching Nazis getting butchered in the utmost brutal and sadistic ways, is it not?

Aatami Korpi is a lone hermit digging for gold in the most northern region of Finland during the last months of WWII. When he hits the jackpot, he loads up his bag with pure gold and hopes to keep a low profile while heading back to civilization. When a platoon of Nazis finds out what he's carrying, though, they obviously want to steal it. But Korpi is not just a weak and defenseless recluse, or what did you expect? He's a force so determined and indestructible that only an obscure and local Finnish term for him exists.

Evidently (and also similar to "Inglourious Bastards"),"Sisu" requires quite some suspension of disbelief from the audience. This man has the fighting and survival skills of John Rambo, but in combination with the indestructability of a T-1000 Terminator! Whether shot at with heavy artillery or a rope, he cannot die. He remains under water for a ridiculously long time and walks away from plane crashes totally unharmed. Is it plausible? Nope. Is it entertaining? You bet! Especially when watching in a chock-full festival theater with a thousand of outrageous horror fanatics shouting at a screen. Must-see!