Sisu

It's all very silly, but it's so over-the-top that it becomes blissfully entertaining.

Rather than being directed to avert your gaze from the effects of violence, you’re watching it magnified to the point of the cartoonish. It’s lavishly embellished with blood and gore. Talk about a guilty pleasure.

Sisu is as good as you’ve heard – bring extra popcorn.

Styled as a midnight movie, Sisu makes terrific use of limited military hardware and a forbidding Lapland landscape. In common with 1980s actioners, there’s additional fun to be had treating gaping injuries on Tommila’s hardened, wiry physique.

For all the pleasure viewers may take in the sight of nameless Nazis being dispatched and dismembered, they may be surprised by the film’s solemnity, too.

Sometimes all you want is a grizzled Finnish gold prospector relentlessly slaughtering cartoon evil Nazis in a variety of inventive and messy ways.

Its combination of ridiculous fun with genuinely compelling themes is a mixture few filmmakers can pull off successfully, yet Helander does so with flying colours.

It takes itself seriously enough to string together a blood-drenched action thrill ride...but doesn't necessarily burden itself too much with matters of realism, probability, or even, when it comes to certain ballistic patterns, physics.

At times the film plays out like a live action Wile-E Coyote cartoon. We see Tommila shot, stabbed, hanged, blown up, beaten, thrown from cars but nothing undoes his resolve to get his gold and get them Nazis dead.

Laconic as its protagonist, the film deploys a choreographed and stylized display of viscera and blood-dripping limbs to create something like “A Thousand and One Ways to Die in War.” [Full review in Spanish]