Sympathy for Mr Vengeance

I actually posted a review in the foreign films thread months ago but I couldn't find it, oh well. Before reading this please be aware there are major spoilers in this review.

If you asked me what I felt after seeing this movie for the first time i'd say numbness. This movie is cold and unflinching, I think it may very well be one of the most depressing movies ever made. The fact that Chan-Wook chose to follow up JSA with this shows the size of his balls. I think this movie didn't do well financially but we reaped the rewards otherwise.

For those who haven't seen this movie, I'll lay it out for you, Ryu is a deaf mute with a sister who's slowly dying, her only hope is to get a transplant. Ryu would gladly give up his own kidney but is told he's the wrong blood type. Ryu is getting desparate so he replies to a number on a black market sticker pasted onto the wall of a public toilet. They screw him and take his money then of all the ironies, a kidney arrives and all he has to do is hand over the cash that he would've had if he'd just waited. Running out of options, his girlfriend, Bae Doon-Na comes up with a plan to kidnap the daughter of a wealthy business man, Dong-Jin (Song Kang-Ho).

I'll stop there but I have to say this movie is essentially about decisions and how they can lead to places of the human soul which lead us to do things we could never dream of. In Ryu's case, everything he did was for his sister, his fatal mistake was trying to cut through the system and he ended up paying dearly for it which led him to make another decision and become a kidnapper. In Dong-Jin's case, his sense of injustice and fury at what happened to his daughter clouded any rational thought and he made the decision to hunt down his daughter's killer.

I'll say this now, Song Kang-Ho delivers an absolutely amazing performance here, korean or otherwise, his slow descent into obsession for justice is mesmerizing. There's one scene where he's watching the autopsy on his daughter and the whole scene runs for 2-3 mins but in that time Song Kang Ho manages to convery just about every facet of emotion without uttering a single word, it's completely heartbreaking and it's the same when he sees his daughter in the living room all wet and he picks her up and hugs her, desparate to hang on to her.

Shin Ha-Kyun nearly matches him and I think Shin may have had the harder performance to pull off seeing as he had to go through the whole movie without uttering a single world and communicate through sign language. His cry of anguish at the death of his sister is piercing because he can't form the words to express his loss. The film really belongs to these two actors but Bae Doo-Na also contributes a worthy performance as Ryu's girlfriend, seems funny to see them using sign language while screwing each other. The scene where Ryu has to share the lift with his dead girlfriend is quite emotional, all he can do is hold her hand on the way down and not make it look obvious.

Chan-Wook paces the movie slowly, as the movie progresses the violence gets progressively nastier, Ryu's method of a baseball bat to deal with the black marketer's is horrific, every swing of that bat and the thwack it made on the body of the man he was beating made me flinch, each and every time.

What else can be said, I think I still prefer this over Oldboy for reasons I can't fathom, maybe I'm just more cynical than I thought but there's an undercurrent of emotion in this film that tends to get overlooked in favor of the violence.

I think the next one is going to be more in line with Oldboy in terms of style. I did read in an interview with Chan-Wook that he said he had no Sympathy for any of the characters in this film because they made their choices out of a blind rationalisation that their actions were warranted on some level.

I agree Oldboy is more watchable and I don't watch this as often but I when I do watch, I find it far more powerful than the more accessible Oldboy.

I think the whole movie is like one giant descent into an abyss which no-one comes back from, it's like a shakesperean tragedy. Ryu makes one mistake which leads to another etc. I mentioned that autopsy scene because it's so heartwrenching, the emotion is laidbare on Dong's face and it's contrasted by a scene later where he's watching them cut up Ryu's gf and he's quite visibly bored. He just doesn't care anymore.

Well, JSA is probably park's most accessible movie so far, it's still pretty good as a murder mystery with political subtext. SFMV isn't as polished or glossy as Oldboy but it's still a great film, I think it has an undercurrent of more emotion than Oldboy but that's just me.

I'll agree this film is cold and violent but I don't see how you can compare this with Iichi the Killer as they're vastly different films. The is film has nowhere near as much violence and depravity as that film, it's relatively tame in comparison, I can't understand how you could compare them. You may have a point that Song didn't really need to watch his daughter getting carved up but that doesn't lessen the impact. I disagree on your assessment that all this movie had going for it was it's coldness, the scene where Song imagined his daughter in the living room was an incredibly powerful moment along with Ryu's reaction to his sister's death, he wants to scream in pain but he can't.

You're overlooking the undercurrent of emotion in this film because you can't get past the violence, Oldboy is a visually more satisfying film for sure but I never once felt the emotional connection that I got with Sympathy.