When I went into the Sisu screening I knew only that it was a Finnish film, so was expecting an arthouse drama, maybe featuring bearded men in nice fisherman knits and herrings being salted, rather than this hyper-violent, viciously bloody exploitation flick from which I may never recover. It is a swift 90 minutes and will please those who desire this experience, and it is clever in its simplistic, empty way. But if it’s not your genre, you will almost certainly find yourself praying: ‘Dear God, I’ll never tell another lie if you just make this end.’

The film begins with a title card saying that ‘Sisu’ is a Finnish world that can’t be translated. It then says that ‘it means a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination’, so I’d say it can, but I’m not getting into a fight about it with any of these people, as they may drive a large blade through my skull or crush my torso under a tank tread. Never mess with these types is my advice.

It’s set in 1944 during the second world war as the Nazis are retreating from Finland but not quietly without a fuss. They’ve adopted a scorched-earth policy and are burning villages to the ground. They are set on leaving as much destruction as possible behind. The landscape is bleakly devastated and deserted but here is a lone fella (Jorma Tommila) panning for gold. He is grizzled, bearded, grimy, dirt-etched. He squints into the winter sun like Clint Eastwood, which is our first clue, right there, that he’s a badass. He has a horse and a dog, a Bedlington terrier, bizarrely (the campest, least macho dog I can think of, apart from a poodle). He finds a tiny nugget of gold, starts digging, uncovers the motherload and fills his saddlebags. But as he journeys he encounters a convoy of Nazis in tanks and trucks led by their brutal commander Bruno (Aksel Hennie), and they fancy the gold for themselves. The set-up is simple: they take his gold, he wants it back. And when he gets it back, they want it back. It’s that, over and over. As severed limbs fly and necks are broken, crunchingly.

The fella, we learn via the Nazi’s radio, is Aatami, a retired Finnish commando who has killed more than 300 Soviet soldiers. Now that he’s suffered the massacre of his family he has nothing to lose. Aatami is one of those silent protagonists – he doesn’t say a single word until the last moments – who is also a one-man army. The fun, if you can call it that, which I wouldn’t particularly, is in wondering how he’ll get out of it this time. It becomes more and more preposterous. A hanging scene (oh God), an underwater scene (oh God), bear no relation to physics as commonly understood. But it is wilfully preposterous. It’s an action film that, in its way, is laughing at action films and all their absurdities and how they must keep outdoing themselves. It’s a John Wick, Rambo, Die Hard, Tarantino-ish knock-off, if you like, but is knowing, and clever in that way. It’s always winking at its audience and saying: ‘Look. Look how far we’ll go. Happy now?’

Written and directed by Jalmari Helander, it is handsomely filmed with a suitably menacing score and is economical, moving briskly from one set-piece to the next.But it’s essentially meaningless and I didn’t care about anything, only the Bedlington. It is divided into chapters and the final one is called: ‘Let’s Talk About This Like Grown Ups.’ I’m kidding. It’s titled: ‘Kill ’Em All’. I may recover one day, but I haven’t as of yet.