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

Review #1,230: 'Train to Busan' (2016)

Train to Busan, Sang-ho Yeon's hugely successful South Korean zombie movie, may just be the most effortlessly enjoyable action movie to feature the brain-hungry undead in years. Taking inspiration from the maestro who created the 'zombie' we know and love today, the late, great George A. Romero, as well as Danny Boyle's faster and scarier flesh-eaters, it's a wonderfully constructed and nail-bitingly tense piece, which manages to mix action, horror and a bit of family drama into two hours of pure entertainment. It also finds time to deliver a message amidst the carnage, and one that is perhaps more relevant than ever in these unpredictable times. In the most hopeless of situations, we must ultimately look out for one another if we are to stand a chance of surviving. Train to Busan condemns those who are willing to sacrifice others to save their own necks.

Workaholic fund manager Seok-woo (Yoo Gong) is the kind of father who always seems to be on his phone at important family events. Divorced and single, he occasionally looks after his young daughter Soo-an (Su-an Kim) in the apartment he shares his mother, but pays such little attention to the girl that he buys her a Nintendo Wii for her birthday, forgetting that he got her the same present the previous year. What she really wants for her birthday is to see her mother in Busan, but Seok-woo is so busy at work that he is unable for find the time to accompany her on the 2 hour round-trip. After taking some advice from his mother, he eventually agrees. They arrive at the train station safe and sound, but it's clear that something isn't quite right. Police and ambulance sirens whizz by, people are running in the street, and the news reports show mass unrest and rioting across the country.

Before the train doors shut however, a sickly woman gets on board. She soon collapses and starts to convulse, only for a poor train attendant to tend to her and wound up bitten. It's a big train however, and Train to Busan starts to clearly establish the collection of characters on board. There's a tough husband and his pregnant wife, two elderly sisters, a young cheerleader, a rich and selfish corporate type, and an entire baseball team, who are handily packing many bats in their luggage. Panic soon sets in as the realisation of a zombie apocalypse dawns on the passengers, and with much of the country either in quarantine or overrun by the military trying to fight off the unstoppable hoard, its unclear just where and when they can stop. Seok-woo's intentions are to look out only himself and his daughter, and teaches the seemingly wiser Soon-an the same. But as the situation becomes increasingly dyer, it becomes clear that they are stronger together.

The atmosphere and tension are turned up to the max during some incredibly inventive set-pieces, which often make the most of the most mundane of locations. These are the running, screeching zombies of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, so cramped train carriages are quickly turned into narrow isles of death. As the passengers learn the zombies' weaknesses, such as their inability to work out a door handle or how they quickly forget about you once you're out of site, the darkness of long tunnels become their ally as they journey from A to B. Sang-ho Yeon is careful to keep the social commentary at the fore, highlighting how fear can turn the nicest of people into selfish, despicable monsters, and how important it is to fight out primal instincts in moments of terror. After a fast-paced first hour, the events become somewhat repetitive and the running time could do with some trimming, but it all pays off with a gripping climax. In a time of zombie overkill, Train to Busan still manages to feel fresh.


Directed by: Sang-ho Yeon
Starring: Yoo Gong, Su-an Kim, Yu-mi Jung, Dong-seok Ma, Woo-sik Choi, Sohee
Country: South Korea

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie

Review #958: 'Snowpiercer' (2013)

Studio interference is certainly nothing new in the movie business, but it's sickening to think that, with all the disastrous films that have been the result of suits sticking their noses into an artists vision, an experienced and extremely successful studio head like Harvey Weinstein can demand edits on a finished product that had already tested well with audiences. And so, Snowpiercer limped onto the big screen in selected cinemas and performed well with the small audiences that were actually able to see it, and is still unreleased in many countries, including here in the UK.

The English-language debut of genre director Joon Ho Bong, Snowpiercer mixes post-apocalyptic spectacle with social and political commentary with equally mixed success. Set on board of the eponymous, self-sufficient train that navigates the globe once every 365 days in a world thrown into a new ice age by our attempts to halt global warming, our scruffy hero Curtis (a steely-eyed Chris Evans) has spent the last 17 years cramped inside of the lower-class carriage. Fed nothing but 'protein bars', which consist of questionable ingredients, and occasionally having their young children taken from them by armed guards, Curtis, along with leader Gilliam (John Hurt), plan a revolt.

The revolt will hopefully lead them to the front carriage, where the upper classes live in luxury and with plenty of space. Backed by his loyal second-in-command Edgar (Jamie Bell), Curtis plans to release security expert Namgoong (Kang-Ho Song) to aid his path through the many carriages, eventually gaining control of the engine held sacred to most. However, their progression is met with resistance by Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton), a Margaret Thatcher-type who demands social order with a small army of masked men with an assortment of nasty weapons, and who answers only to the train's creator, Wilford (Ed Harris).

Snowpiercer is at its best when at its most ferocious. A carriage fight involving Mason's terrifying guards and Curtis's beaten-down group of peasants, played out mostly in darkness, is a moment of nightmarish horror. Evans, having done little of note since he became Captain America, gives it his all throughout, showing us the darker side of his persona now so synonymous with the clean-cut and morally righteous Steve Rogers. However, these injections of ferocity switch to outright comedy within the blink of an eye. Ho Bong has always been good at mood shifts - the swings from comedy to tragedy in his Memories of Murder (2003) is what made the film a masterpiece in my humble opinion - but Snowpiercer struggles to blend these moments together.

Almost immediately after the bloody battle, Curtis finds himself in a classroom teaching 'train babies', where we learn the history of the train and how they are being taught to worship the 'sacred engine'. It is filmed with a Terry Gilliam-esque absurdity, all bizarre angles and close-ups of an over-the-top Alison Pill as the violence turns into slapstick, jarring with the brutality that came before. For the most part, this is grim stuff, and Ho Bong is keen to keep reminding you. Along with the heavy violence throughout, we also get a monologue about eating babies that is too ridiculous to be taken with a straight face. There are some interesting comments regarding the use of fear and chaos to control a populace at the end, but the film doesn't seem to know when and how to finish. A very hit-and-miss experience.


Directed by: Joon Ho Bong
Starring: Chris Evans, Kang-Ho Song, Ed Harris, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Jamie Bell
Country: South Korea/Czech Republic/USA/France

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie

Review #447: 'I Saw the Devil' (2010)

Continuing in a wave of ultra-violent revenge films from South Korea, - crystallised in Chan-wook Park's excellent Vengeance Trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003) and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005)) - I Saw the Devil takes the genre into brutal, kinetic, and near-to-the-knuckle gornography. Oldboy's Min-sik Choi plays a serial killer, Kyung-chul, who kills Joo-yeon (San-ha Oh) in her car in the opening of the film. She is the girlfriend of secret agent Kim Soo-hyeon (Byung-hun Lee), who then embarks on a no-holds-barred mission to find and kill the man who killed her.

It's your standard revenge film, filled with over the top grand guignol-like moments of gore, as heads are particularly targeted for tense battering, aided by the frenzied camera. But what makes these moments far more ferocious is the fact that between these contained flourishes of violence are connected with the more serene, delicate moments - it can become jarring. However, the use of this technique is an easy trick, and this is the issue with most films by Jee-woon Kim. Kim has that post-MTV generation paradox, - with its influence of short cuts fast camera movements, and stylisation - the content is largely left behind in favour of style. Since the 1980's, a film's look has often been more important than a message, or at least string narrative cinema.

The fact that Kim, and writer Hoon-jung Park have imbued the film with it's knowledge of the serial killer movie into the revenge film is a nice touch, but it is still thematically no different than any other revenge film. In bold strokes, I Saw the Devil, simplistically relates to the themes of the duality of mankind, as the agent digs deeper into an encompassing psychology of hatred, effecting all around him. To catch the killer, Kim Soo-hyeon has to become the killer, bringing him to the same level of depravity. It's a very stylish film, and the filmic touches are often stunning. However, with a rather long running time for this type of film, it does become increasingly nasty, and the beating, stabbings, and torture almost become the entire film, missing an opportunity to explore in an interesting and complex duality of the lead killer/agent.


Directed by: Jee-Woon Kim
Starring: Byung-Hun Lee, Min-Sik Choi, San-Ha Oh
Country: South Korea

Rating: ***

Marc Ivamy

Review #220: 'The Coast Guard' (2002)

Kang (Dong-Gun Jang) is a soldier assigned to patrol the border of the North-South Korea divide. His sole job is to shoot anyone that crosses the border, as they are to be considered North Korean spies. As it holds many rewards, Kang is eager to kill someone. One night on duty in town, he gets into an argument with a gang of youths having drinks, including Mi-Yeong (Ji-A Park). As a means of defying the soldiers who they believe are just living easy off the tax payers' money, Mi-Yeong crosses the border with a young man and the two have sex. Kang spots the man's head and opens fire, killing him, and throws a grenade that blows him apart. Mi-Yeong descends into madness, stalking the army camp and having sex with various soldiers. Kang also goes mad with guilt, and is eventually dismissed from the coast guard, only return with vengeance on his mind.

As good as the premise for this film sounds, I really did find it disappointingly amateurish. The interesting themes lying throughout the film are drowned out by bad plotting, and simply unbelievable incidents. How Kang, a relatively green soldier with no real combat experience, turns into a super-slick Jason Bourne-alike who can deceive a whole patrol overnight is just ridiculous. It's clear that director Ki-Duk Kim is trying to portray the soldiers as useless, but the amount of times they are disarmed by having their weapons simply grabbed out of their hands is unrealistic. And some scenes are just repeated over and over again, notably Kang appearing, ravaged by madness, not realising he has been dismissed, only to be told he is mad by his ex-fellow servicemen and punched and kicked away. It gets tiresome quickly, and appears that the director just ran out of ideas.

It's not to say that some parts of the film aren't effective. The tragic Mi-Yeong, having slept with many of the soldiers believing them to be her dead ex-lover, finds herself pregnant. Her brother, enraged, demands that the soldiers responsible come forward. Mi-Yeong kisses the guilty men one by one on the cheek, gleefully unaware of the gravity of the situation, only for her brother to stare horrified as one after the other step forward. The scene where she crawls into her brother's fish tank, bloody from a forced abortion, is truly brilliant. The water fills up with blood as she sits there, unable to grasp what is happening. It's a powerful scene in a disappointingly poor film.


Directed by: Ki-Duk Kim
Starring: Dong-Gun Jang, Ji-A Park, Jeong-Hak Kim
Country: South Korea

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie

Review #102: 'A Tale of Two Sisters' (2003)

Bloody Hollywood. Stealing everybody's ideas and Americanising everything (I suppose I should have spelt that 'Americanizing'!). Stealing UK ideas (Get Carter (1971), The Wicker Man (1973), Deal Or No Deal), Asian films (The Ring (1998), Infernal Affairs (2002), The Grudge (2002)) and the best of world cinema (Let The Right One In (2008), The Vanishing (1988), Wings Of Desire (1987)) for their own profit! Just kidding. It's easy to say all that without realising that the U.S. are most bum-raped of them all when it comes to other countries stealing their ideas. They've been criticised most recently for their seemingly endless remakes of Asian horrors and turning a quick buck. But the remakes are usually so damn awful that people are quick to forget that the originals are pretty shocking too.

Su-Mi (Su-Jeong Lim) and Su-Yeon (Geun-Young Moon) are young sisters who arrive at a remote house with their father. They are going to live with their stepmother who they both dislike. The sisters are very close, and Su-Yeon especially clings to her sister like a safety blanket. Things soon start to get strange - bruises start appearing on Su-Yeon's arms, a unknown entity sneaks into their room at night, and a strange figure appears at the base of Su-Mi's bed and drips blood from between its legs. Su-Mi believes that the stepmother is up to no good and is trying to mentally torture the two, but then it becomes clear that all may not be what it seems.

What begins as a slow and quietly menacing film quickly loses its grip. The long, beautifully framed shots led me to believe that this would be a slow-burner, and would creep up on me to take a drastic turn like many a good Asian film does. But it soon became apparent that the fact that not much was happening was not a clever build-up, but a way to deceive me while covering up just how frightfully dull it is. I felt like every scene I was watching after the first fifteen minutes or so I'd seen countless times before.

I don't quite understand why Asian horror films all seem to feel the need to include the long, black-haired spectre with one eye poking out underneath. It was first done (as far as I know) in the thoroughly enjoyable and effective Ring, which seem to kick-start the whole Asian horror boom. Then it turned up in The Grudge, which was pretty damn terrible. And now here, a film that likes to think it belongs in the more sophisticated category. The scene where it appears just seemed like such a desperate cloy for a cheap scare that sat uneasily with the rest of the film, and just lacked any sort of imagination because it is literally the exact same 'character' seen before.

An absolute crushing disappointment, as I'd heard so many good things about this film. But I found it unoriginal, uninteresting and lacking any kind of genuine shocks, scares or psychological torment. The film is beautifully filmed however, and the two girls in the lead roles are very good, showing a timidness and mental unbalance way beyond their years. The film was, of course, was remade into The Uninvited (2009), which I've heard is truly, and inevitably, terrible.


Directed by: Jee-Woon Kim
Starring: Su-Jeong Lim, Geun-Young Moon, Jung-Ah Yum, Kap-Su Kim
Country: South Korea

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie