After fourteen years in a sinecure job at his father-in-law Johan’s company, Tommi (Antti Luusuaniemi) needs a raise in order to afford his dream house. His neighbour Juhis (Kari Ketonen) suggests that he gets involved in the boss’s birthday parachute jump – a family affair since Tommi’s pilot wife Harriet (Maria Ylipää) is flying the plane. But this is not the first time that Juhis, Harriet’s former Gulf War comrade, has dragged Tommi into trouble, and when faced with the half-mile drop to the land below, Tommi loses control of his bladder.

Harriet lands the plane on a pretext, and the men arrive at the party being thrown for Johan (Taneli Mäkelä). Tommi tries to give a resounding speech about how Johan has inspired him to be bold, unaware that the entire company of guests, including the fuming Johan, has just seen video footage of him pissing himself on a plane.

Without any hope of a promotion, Tommi resorts to cryptocurrency investment in order to scrape up the money, betting his house on a swift return. As he goes “all-in” on a life-changing risk, his business rival Patrick (Olavi Virta‘s Lauri Tilkanen, having a ball playing the bad guy again) sets up a series of situations that Johan can use to convince Harriet that Tommi is cheating on her.

The crypto company turns out to be a scam, and Tommi loses everything, including Harriet, who takes their daughter off to her father’s summer cottage, where Patrick commences a louche attempt to woo her. Discovering that the crypto company is run by Johan’s wayward brother Göran (Lasse Karkjärvi), Juhis and Tommi blag their way into prison posing as his lawyers, and persuade him to retrieve the money and hand it to Tommi, purely to spite Johan.

Juhis proves to Harriet that Tommi was set up, Tommi gets his money back, and all is well again, in this feature follow-up to the comedy series Luottomies (2016-21). The original series was an absolute joy – comprising 10-minute online shorts in which Juhis inevitably led the ineffectual Tommi into compromising situations reminiscent of Victor Meldrew’s misfortunes in One Foot in the Grave. This movie outing often feels lost in a longer format, and lacks the swift set-ups and slapstick pay-offs of the series that birthed it. Crucially, it leaves Juhis out of the action for long stretches – presumably because the actor who plays him is also the director. In the original, it was always Juhis whose well-intentioned schemes landed Tommi in deep water. Here, Tommi falls for the for the crypto scam all by himself, while Juhis dolefully observes that he only comes to him for help after secretly plotting to move away from the neighbourhood.

Finnish critics largely agreed, variously noting either that they missed the ten-minute set-up/joke of the originals, or that there was little point in a movie that didn’t go big. But for his feature, writer-director Kari Ketonen instead homes in on a different form of comedy tension, often invisible to outsiders: the cultural stand-off between Finns and Swedes. Tommi is repeatedly emasculated by the attitudes and expectations of his Renwall in-laws, who have all the money, sophistication and business smarts. He has even taken his wife’s surname, as Tommi Mäkinen-Renwall – in one of the film’s best gags, his angry father-in-law tells him to hand back the Renwall in the divorce settlement, “but you can keep the hyphen as a reminder.”

Despite the carping from the press, the movie also keeps to the spirit of the original in the sense that Juhis really is Tommi’s misguided guardian angel (luottomies, or literally “trust-man”). Although Juhis repeatedly creates difficulties for Tommi, he is also unfailingly there when he really needs him, and ultimately manages to save the day, in a successful reset-to-zero that allows the cast to all be in place ready for the next movie follow-up, Wingman: Sabbatical (2026), which takes the cast off to Spain. What could possibly go wrong?

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so you don’t have to. Wingman: All-In is streaming with English subtitles on YLE Areena.