During the last days of World War II, a solitary prospector crosses paths with Nazis on a scorched-earth retreat in northern Finland. When the soldiers decide to steal his gold, they quickly discover they just tangled with no ordinary miner.

The protagonist is absolutely a badass. This is a lesson to never steal a mans gold. “Get down on your knees, grandpa,” one orders, laughing so hard that he doesn’t notice the hunting knife entering his skull through his left ear and exiting out of the right. And that’s just for starters.

For the rest of this extravagantly violent and cheerfully entertaining action film from Finland, director Jalmari Helander treats us to a comedy of deaths: a lavish grisly feast of Nazis meeting their maker in outrageous and wildly silly ways that had the audience I watched it with shrieking with laughter.

It opens with a granite-faced miner striking gold in the middle of nowhere. He heads off on horseback heading to the city with a bag full of gold. Along the way he meets some Nazis coming out of Finland. They decide to mess with the wrong guy and his gold so it begins.

He turns out to be a legendary Finnish soldier called Aatami, so tough that he can plunge his hand deep into his own innards to pull out shrapnel. Earlier in the war, the Russians nicknamed him the Immortal, and he’s played by Jorma Tommila. Like John Wick in a spaghetti western, Aatami takes out the Nazis one by one.

Phoenix Out

Rating: 6.9 / 10