Sisu: Road To Revenge (15, 88 mins)
Verdict: Violent, but exhilaratingly bonkers
Nobody can convince me that predictive text-messaging doesn’t have a sense of humour.
When I texted a friend to ask if he wanted to come with me to a preview screening of Sisu: Road To Revenge, the word ‘Sisu’ came out as ‘Sissy’.
Well, never was there less of a sissy than Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila), the tough-as-teak Finnish gold prospector and former army commando, whom we first met in the wildly entertaining, outrageously bloodthirsty 2022 film Sisu.
Then, he single-handedly wiped out more Nazis than a whole Allied tank division.
This time, he turns his merciless eye on the Red Army, making Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Alan Carr as he embarks on a mission to avenge the massacre of his family.
Do not mess with this man:Â Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) is on a mission, to get the psycho Soviet soldiers who killed his wife and kids
It is now 1946, and Soviet soldiers have run amok in rural Finland, murdering and mutilating civilians. Among them are Aatami’s wife and two young sons, slaughtered on the orders of psychotically cruel Red Army officer Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang).
But at the start of Jalmari Helander’s English-language film — not that there’s much talking in it — Draganov is banged up in a Siberian prison. Richard Brake plays the KGB officer who orders his release on condition that he finishes the Finn.
The man Aatami most wants to kill is the man best equipped to kill him.
Red alert: Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang) plays the Soviet officer who Aatami’s family
Armed and extremely dangerous: Angry Finnish prospector Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila)Â
And while all this is going on, our grizzled hero has dismantled the wooden family house plank by plank, and is looking for somewhere to rebuild it.
What duly unfolds is one quarter Channel 4’s Grand Designs, three-quarters Mad Max: Fury Road — although perhaps what the film most resembles is an insanely violent Clint Eastwood revenge Western, shunted 5,000 miles or so east.
Like Clint, Aatami doesn’t say much. In fact, he doesn’t say anything at all; just roars with anger now and then.
And Lang’s Draganov, as it happens, bears more than a passing resemblance to Lee Van Cleef.
Even the music sounds like Ennio Morricone might have composed it on a slightly iffy day.
The word ‘sisu’, we learn, means a kind of ‘white-knuckled form of courage’, which manifests when all hope is lost.
Aatami is its apotheosis, defeating the odds time and again in ever-more cartoonish ways as each set of Soviet killers sent to crush him are themselves eliminated.
And not only does he somehow stay alive himself, so does his only companion, a Bedlington Terrier given every reason to wish he was safely back in Bedlington.
Like the first film it’s huge fun if you like this sort of thing, divided into the kind of chapters Quentin Tarantino might have devised, one of which is unambiguously titled ‘Motor Mayhem’.
Amid all the violence and gore, Road To Revenge is exhilaratingly, laugh-out-loud bonkers, with spectacular stunts involving planes, trains and automobiles … and tanks.
It is certainly not for the squeamish. But nor is it to be taken at all seriously, except perhaps at the Ukrainian box office, where I have a hunch it will do very well indeed.
 ALSO SHOWING…
The Thing With Feathers (15, 98 mins)
 Benedict Cumberbatch gives a typically committed performance in The Thing With Feathers as Dad, the father of two young boys whose wife has just died, and whose extreme grief manifests in the form of an enormous, sardonic crow, voiced by David Thewlis.
Constant companion: Benedict Cumberbatch plays a man grieving for his dead wife, whose sorrow manifests itself in the form of a huge black crow
‘She was everything to me,’ cries Dad.. ‘She was everything to me,’ repeats the crow, mockingly. ‘Sounds like a ****ing fridge magnet.’
An adaptation of Max Porter’s acclaimed novella Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, the film teeters on the edge of horror and is not an easy watch, while the crow as a living metaphor arguably works better on the page than on screen.
But Cumberbatch acting with every sinew is always worth the price of admission.
The Carpenter’s Son (15, 94 mins)
Nicolas Cage, on the other hand, invariably gives it 25 per cent too much, and does so again in The Carpenter’s Son, an overwrought exercise in biblical-horror which doesn’t name Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but we’re left in no doubt that’s who they are.
Biblical horror: Nicolas Cage plays ‘The Father’ in The Carpenter’s Son, which tells the story of Joseph, Mary and Jesus, without naming them
Noah Jupe does his best as ‘the Son’, while Cage acts his leather sandals off as the tormented husband of ‘the Mother’ (FKA Twigs). The film begins with Mary wailing as she gives birth and gets steadily more melodramatic from there.
Testimony (12A, 105 mins)Â
Childbirth looms large in Testimony (12A, 105 mins, ****), too; a thunderously powerful documentary about the Magdalene laundries in Ireland, and the collusion of the state and the Catholic Church in the mistreatment and downright abuse of the thousands of unmarried mothers incarcerated there, even as their babies were sold to adopting couples overseas.
The shocking story has been dramatised in films such as Philomena (2013) and Small Things Like These (2024) but it needed telling in documentary form, and Testimony does that compellingly.
