Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

Day 26

Film 25

Before I get to work on Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance I first want to say this: Look! 25 films down! Sweet right? I am just 75 movies away from the goal. As much as I would like to say that it is a short way away the next 75 films seem to be quite daunting. Oh well, at this point there is only one thing to do really, and that is just keep on doing it.

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Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is the first film of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy. A couple days ago I reviewed Oldboy (which is the second of the seemingly unrelated films) and I was absolutely blown away by it. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is no Oldboy, which is both sad and expected.

The beginning of the film is slow, and the main characters have a hard time getting you to care about them and the pace crawls. The main character Ryu (Ha-kyun) is a deaf mute who is a nice enough guy, working in a closing factory, and taking care of his dieing sister (Ji-eun.) Ryu bargains with some mafia types selling organs, but lacks the money to pay for the operation. This leads Ryu, after being provoked by his girlfriend Cha Yeong-mi (Doona) to kidnap his ex-boss Park Dong-jin's (Kang-ho) daughter.

Everything falls apart when the sister dies. Ryu is forced to bury his sister along side a river and Park's child accidentally drowns. The story degrades into a corpsefest as Park attempts to get revenge on Ryu and Cha while Ryu goes after the mobsters who made it impossible to save his sister.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is a quiet film. There is no soundtrack, most of the film is acted quietly or signed out and the absence of sound makes the film drag. Chan-wook seems to be playing with sound, and even if it does not work it is interesting to look at how it changes the film.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance falls pretty far short of its sequel Oldboy. It is by no means a bad film, but the chances Chan-wook took with the film made it less than enjoyable to watch.