Review of Lady Vengeance (2005) by Kay L — 22 Jan 2015

Out of the three Park Chan-wook vengeance films, this one is the weakest. Oldboy is probably one of the greatest foreign films of all time and one of my personal favorite movies. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is a very good movie, but not quite as good as Oldboy. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is just okay. It has the same style and (surprisingly) a lot more humor. Many of the familiar players from Oldboy, so the acting is very good as well. However, seeing all of these actors just made me wish I was watching Oldboy again.

It's probably not fair to compare Lady Vengeance to the other two movies. How could this ever live up to those movies? Still, I just found myself sitting and watching this movie and waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was expecting many twists and turns in the plot, but Lady Vengeance is the most straightforward plot of the trilogy. This doesn't really help when the plot is VERY similar to Kill Bill. I didn't really care for the Ms. Geum-ja character either. I didn't really sympathize for her (which I understand wasn't necessarily what Park Chan-wook was going for) so I didn't really care if she ended up with her daughter again or got her vengeance (in fact, I expected it to be revealed she was more sinister and devious than she was letting on).

It's just a weak plot, even if on the surface it has all the makeup that made Oldboy so good.