Stephen Lang does not know why folks respond so enthusiastically when he plays villains. But he has a theory, and it involves you.“It’s probably the eyes,” chuckles the star of Avatar, Don’t Breathe, and this weekend’s Sisu: Road to Revenge. “But when you are an actor, I think it’s almost the wrong guy to ask about that. Because the answer is invariably going to be ‘it’s my voice, it’s my eyes, it’s my smile.’ I don’t know why I’m effective, but I’m effective because you, the audience. You bring a lot to it.”cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",mediaId: "1cec207a-887c-48f3-ae9a-edc542f26b4e"}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});That might be, but Lang also offers more than most to whatever project he’s working on, and in the case of Sisu 2, a sequel to the surprise Finnish action hit, the American actor’s casting gave Road to Revenge an entirely different flavor. According to writer-director Jalmari Helander, the suggestion of Lang came from the sequel’s American distributors, Sony Pictures, but it also influenced what became the central crux of the film.“I was thinking of a much younger bad guy,” Helander admits when we catch up with him at Fantastic Fest. “Like a more physical danger in a way. But I really loved the idea when—I think it came from Sony—they said ‘what about Stephen Lang?’ These both being old dudes, I find that really interesting.”Indeed, whereas 2021’s Sisu captured the imagination of genre fans around the world by having Jorma Tommila’s Aatami Korpi wordlessly dismantle what seemed like the entire Third Reich in a fantasy vision of the final days of World War II in Nazi-occupied Finland, Sisu: Road to Revenge is both a grander and more intimate affair. After all, we are told as part of Korpi’s mysterious backstory in the first Sisu that he earned nicknames like “the Immortal” and Koschei (a powerful sorcerer is Slavic folklore) by bedeviling the Russian Red Army for years. The reasons for this, we cryptically learn, had something to do with what the Soviets did to his family.In Sisu: Road to Revenge, we meet those Soviets, and one in particular played by Lang as the polar opposite of Korpi. While Tommila’s hero is the absolute quiet type—a conspicuous presence who has about as many lines of dialogue as Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp in a 1920s silent film—Lang’s Igor Draganov is a loquacious, grandstanding Red Army officer who perhaps never wanted to become the butcher of Finland. But due to the orders from his superiors he has a long, red-stained history with the Korpi family.“They’re two sides of the same coin,” Lang observes. “They both persevere, they’re both relentless. The difference is this: Tommila has lost so much. He’s lost everything because he’s lost his family. Igor’s got nothing to lose and never has had anything to lose. And that’s a tough position to be in.”Still, it was the finer details of Lang’s acting choices that attracted Helander to the casting, as well as opening up a character who is perhaps as much of an intellectual threat to Korpi as a physical one.“Lang really wanted to have that mustache, and I think he looks really cool with that mustache,” the writer-director chuckles about his antagonist, even allowing there might be some echoes of Soviet Union despot Joseph Stalin’s appearance.“Stalin has much in common with Igor, the callousness, the coldness,” Lang considers. “The calculating cruelty of it, that’s something we very much associate with Uncle Joe, you know?” Even so, the actor points out the movie is escapism and he wasn’t looking to make a historical statement with the character. In fact, the mustache in part came from having just immediately played a role that required copious amounts of facial hair. And “when you’re removing it for a new character, you do so in stages to see what looks right, and I thought the mustache was not a bad thing.” The image is further juxtaposed with glasses in Igor’s quieter scenes and the hint of a hunch. There is a deep exhaustion and perhaps intellectual resignation in the performance of a Russian officer who we meet imprisoned by his own government before being sent back into Finland to finish the job with the “Koschei.”“He’s got a good bit of Dostoyevsky in him, doesn’t he?” Lang muses. “There’s something very Dostoyevsky about him… the Russian darkness that can be acknowledged in much of their literature is very present in the character. He’s an intelligent man but he’s devoid of feelings. Those feelings have all been systematically removed.”Yet it feeds into a movie that all recognize as utterly madcap. The first Sisu was also of course grandiose in its aesthetics and stylings. Lang says that when he saw it, he’d “never heard this voice” from a filmmaker before. While the movie had influences of everything from Spaghetti Westerns to ‘80s action flicks, there was a droll playfulness to how it blended that impressed the actor. “That’s a word I would use to describe Jalmari as a filmmaker,” Lang says. “His humor, his wit is both sly and dry, and dry and sly.”And in Road to Revenge the action is elevated to a near symphonic level of Looney Tunes excess. Helander tells us he actually drew on Buster Keaton silent films and Bugs Bunny antics while designing the set pieces of the sequel. He likewise winks to the most iconic truck chace in cinema history, courtesy of Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark.“I’ve seen that truck sequence a million times, so it’s definitely there, and it has the same kind of tone in a way,” Helander says. “And there is also a pretty clear homage to when he puts the hand grenade to the front wheel of the bike and it flips, which is directly from the third Indiana Jones film with the explosion in the air.”The point of Sisu: Road to Revenge though is to be able to take it to a more outlandish place. The director smiles, for instance, that one of his favorite bits to write involved his truck being flipped almost upside down and turning its rear cargo into a projectile missile.In many ways, it feels like the first Sisu’s cartoonish violence reaching its final form, and all while Helander kept it in his uncompromising Finnish sensibilities. Still, not all notes are bad ones. The director candidly admits he got a great piece of advice on the first film when Korpi’s trusted sidekick, a fluffy Bedlington Terrier, had a door left open to it for the sequel.“In my original Sisu 1 script, the dog actually exploded,” Helander laughs. “But there were quite a few people who said that might be a mistake, so I didn’t blow the dog up. And I think it was a wise decision.” Between that and the casting of Lang, that’s two for two in the world of Sisu.Sisu: Road to Revenge opens on Friday, Nov. 21.The post Sisu 2: Meet the Man Who Can Stop the Immortal appeared first on Den of Geek.