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 #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