Review #1,451: 'Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance' (2002)

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance kicks off Korean director Chan-wook Park's unofficial 'Vengeance' trilogy, which continues with standout Oldboy, before concluding with the stylish Lady Vengeance. While the violence may seem like it's taken straight out of a movie by Quentin Tarantino or Eli Roth, Sympathy doesn't over-simplify this complex tale of revenge like, say, Kill Bill does, nor does it seem out of place as the intricate narrative spins further out of control and its characters resort to increasingly desperate measures. Park opted for a pulpier approach with the jaw-dropping Oldboy and a more lyrical, hyper-stylised aesthetic with Lady Vengeance, and while this may be down to dropping cinematographer Byeong-il Kim, the quiet realist bent of this trilogy-opener makes it the most accessible, and by far the most thought-provoking entry.

Deaf-mute factory worker Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin) has just been fired from his job. With his sister (Ji-Eun Lim) in desperate need of a kidney transplant and willing donors in short supply, Ryu takes all of his savings to a black market organ dealer gang who not only fail to deliver, but steal one of Ryu's kidneys too. With a donor now found by the hospital but no money to pay for it, Ryu and his radical anarchist girlfriend Yeong-mi (Doona Bae) concoct a plan to kidnap the daughter of rich company president Dong-Jin Park (Kang-ho Song). All seems to be going according to plan until Ryu's sister catches wind of the plot and kills herself, and things unravel quickly from there. Events lead Park to take matters into his own hands, stopping at nothing until he gets his hands on the couple brazen enough to take his daughter. But Ryu, who is down a sister and a kidney, is also on his own revenge mission to find and kill those responsible for setting him off on such a bloody and irredeemable path.

While most revenge thrillers attempt to hold a mirror to its hero and the carnage in their wake, the line between good and bad is drawn pretty clearly. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance attempts to muddy these lines as much as possible, to the point where any of the characters here could easily be fill the bad guy role in other movies. Ryu and Park are both fundamentally 'good', but are driven to gruesome extremes by emotions too complex to fit neatly into one category or the other. The violence here is shocking. Mostly its warranted, but sometimes the film veers into exploitative territory. An extended torture scene is cruel, and a moment depicting a group of masturbating teens is simply off-putting, although I feel it is meant to be comedic. But the extreme Asian films of the early 2000s were always trying to out-do whatever came before, and Park never allows the violence to become a gimmick or overshadow the themes at play. In the end, you'll be empathising with everybody while questioning their actions, and while it may not reach the dizzying, electrifying heights of Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance makes for an engaging and fresh take on the ugly, cyclical nature of revenge.


Directed by: Chan-wook Park
Starring: Kang-ho Song, Ha-kyun Shin, Doona Bae, Ji-Eun Lim, Bo-bae Han
Country: South Korea

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie