Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance (Collector's Edition) [DVD] [2002]

People seem to make some strange mistakes when watching films like this one. They expect to leave the cinema e.t.c feeling great, with a sense of closure and fulfilment, and this therefore makes a good film. Why should this be?

This is not a nice film. You will leave this feeling tired and weary and thinking "why couldn't it have been different...?" You have to look pretty hard to find someone being nice. You have a tragic kidnapper who cannot hear or speak, and a father who will do anything for his child, I ended up feeling sorry for everyone! This is a grim portrayal of life, and you will not come to the end of this film with an affirmation of all life's goodness. With this said, IT IS A GREAT FILM! Everything is done well, the acting and directing is not quite on par with Oldboy but I believe it is a fitting part of Park Chan-Wook's revenge trilogy. Beware, though, this is not 'lovey dovey' cinema. It's a show of how unkind life can be.

Before you watch this film, just be aware that you're not going to walk away from it with a big smile on your face. More like you'll want to slit your wrists. To say that Mr. Vengeance is a powerful, gut-wrenching nightmare is like saying that DaVinci merely dabbled in art.

The plot is so simple yet so complex. The direction is so elegant yet so hard-hitting. The simplistic nature of the story makes the descent into hell so shocking and captivating. You don't realize there is no going back until it's far, FAR too late.

Ryu is a deaf/mute who works in the loudest factory in the world, doing a really depressing job. His sister needs a kidney transplant, but they don't have the money to pay for it. He cannot give her one of his own because their blood types do not match. Ryu decides to go to black market organ traders to trade one of his own for one that matches his sister. Waking up naked and kidney-less in an abandoned building he now needs to raise money for his own kidney.

Ryu is now fired from his job by President Park, who is downsizing the company. His anarchist girlfriend Yeong-mi convinces him to kidnap Park's daughter and hold her to ransom. From then on, things get very, very, VERY heavy and the idea of who exactly Mr. Vengeance is is blurred and sympathy is felt for almost everyone. Revenge comes at a high price and seemingly never ends. Not that I am saying forgiving and forgetting is the way. But this movie will make you think twice about getting your own back.

The violence is spontaneous and extremely graphic without ever feeling exploitational. Sometimes it has a darkly comic feel to it, the rest of the time it's goddamn hardcore. You'll wince a great deal during this movie, that's for damn sure.

Park Chan-wook directs with such beautifully composed images that are far from the the garish MTV-style action/thriller movies produced in Hollywood these days. I don't want to sound like some sort of snob who proclaims all foreign films to be great and all Hollywood to be crap but it's not very often that Hollywood makes a film like this unless it's a remake. Written in a mere 20 hours in a single massive, creative outburst, this movie seems to have genius laced through every minute of it's running time.

Not a date movie, not a whogivesadamn pig-out movie. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is a film you will be sucked right into and you'll be far from happy when you emerge at the end. But what a horrific ride!

The DVD is in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby/DTS 6.1 sound.

Unfortunately overshadowed by the equally superb Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr Vengence is a brilliantly bleak film charting the apparent futility of existence in a modern South Korea. This film is surely a modern tragedy of the best Shakespearean pedigree; After being fired from his factory job during a business 'streamlining' exerise (deftly showing the contempt of modern society for anyone considered remotely unproductive) Ryu a deaf mute can no longer afford to pay for his sister to have a kidney transplant. His fate is sealed from the moment he tries to sell one of his kidneys to black market organ traders in exchange for one that will save his ailing sister, who take the money he was paying them and one of his kidneys leaving him for dead in a multistory car park. His path to hell truly is paved with good intentions as he becomes ever more desperate to save his sister he kidnaps a the daughter of the man who recently fired him from the factory he had been working in, yet he and his sister develop a touching relationship with the girl who drowns accidentally in the same lake that Ryu and his sister spent their childhood playing in whilst Ryu is burying the body of his sister who despite his best efforts he failed to save. The film deals with among other things the plight of those left behind by the explosion of prosperity that Korea experienced in the last 20 years. Another theme is that of disability whether it is emotional, physical, mental or social affects all the characters, they all experience some form of social alienation as a result and it is this alientation that is at the root of the terrible events that unfold.

What separates the films of Park Chan-wook from other directors in the so called 'extreme' genre of modern asian cinema is the way in which he uses violence not simply for violence's sake; racking up the body count as some directors do (at times there seems to be a clandestine competition going on to see who can kill the most people in a film) but as a method of totally engaging the audience in the films. Like Oldboy this is not, by the standards of the genre at least a particularly violent film which makes the very short episodes of violence all the more explosive and jaw dropping when taken against the wonderfully composed emotional drama of the characters struggle against both the futility of their own actions and an uncaring society that has forced the protaganists onto this doomed course. Particularly effective is the scene where Ryu visits his revenge upon the black marketeers who stole his kidney, you really can feel every blow of the baseball bat as he caves in the heads of his adversaries. The violence is totally effective, there is no question of becoming numb to it as can happen in some films you feel every single blow and smell every drop of blood.

The film is well written staying away from cliched quasi intellectualism or philosophising in the dialogue yet conveying a strong moral and political message. It is sumptuously shot much in the same style as Oldboy although not quite as polished and in terms of production values it feel at times like a low budget film, however this only adds to the brutal reality of the movie. It is a must see film and whether you like asian cinema or not it has a really universal appeal it deals with the issues of alienation that we have all experienced directly or indirectly and accomplishing it in a novel manner. Park Chan-Wook truly is one of the brightest and most challenging directors around regardless of nationality or genre.