Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
R
2005
* out of ****

Wow. BAD MOVIE. This is the second in Korean director Chan Wook Park’s “vengeance” trilogy, and I have to say that after watching Oldboy, which was excellent, this came as a brutal let down.

Premise: A deaf and mute young man (Ryu) sells one of his kidneys on the black market to save his older sister, who is dying and can’t afford an organ transplant surgery. When the black market people rip him off, he and his radical revolutionary girlfriend kidnap the daughter of Ryu’s former boss, who had just recently fired Ryu from his job. **This next section will contain spoilers, so if you want to see this movie (and I don’t see why you would!) don’t read it.**

Okay, this was a decent, if unimaginative, premise. However, Park takes this premise and tries to turn it into some ridiculously dark, desperate, twisted film, with more in the way of brutal and gory scenes. I like dark films and I don’t mind brutal and gory, but it’s got to be done well, and it needs to be something besides utterly pointless. And stupid. Which is what this movie was.

So, here’s the sequence of events: Ryu tries to get his sister a new kidney via black market. Black market guys rip him off. Ryu and girlfriend kidnap a little girl. Ryu’s sister finds out and kills herself. While burying his sister, little girl accidentally drowns. Little girl’s father kills Ryu’s girlfriend. Ryu kills the black market guys. The father kills Ryu. Girlfriend’s revolutionary terrorist group kills the father. The end.

Not only was this whole movie completely pointless, poorly done, and brutal, you hated every single one of the main characters. There were no good guys - everyone was evil. Evil as in torture and brutal murder. Yay. Just what we all want to see. On top of all this, the story was completely disjointed. Half the time you have no idea what’s going on, where characters are, and why they’re doing what they’re doing.

In conclusion, I’ll say again that Chan Wook Park was trying to make a dark, desperate film, and succeeded only in making a twisted, unlikeable movie that has absolutely nothing to appreciate.