Review of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) by Joe H — 25 Jun 2011

I know I'm rating it the same as Oldboy, but I was more entertained in Oldboy than this. Chan-wook Park is an awful storyteller. I don't get why his movies are popular. He is light on character development and heavy on gore.

I might as well have watched Saw, but with less going on. Here is the main character: he is deaf and he wants to help his sister and he has a hot anarchist girlfriend. OK, got it. That's all? Yep.

By the way, you don't even find out she's an anarchist until the second half of the film, or really that she's his girlfriend. I thought she might have been his sister until she beat him up for screwing up and losing his kidney.

Where did that storyline go? He will protect himself from people who want to kill him, but he won't kill the people who stole his kidney? We don't even know he is with his sister when he is with her at first.

I liked the way the did the translation of the sign language (switching to white over black), but I didn't like the random narration they used because they didn't know how to tell what was happening.

Who cares that he thought it was too deep because of something that happened to him when he was a kid? It had nothing to do with the story! Or his character! Then halfway into the movie we finally see the father of the girl who was kidnapped and killed.

Nothing from him either other than he is a successful businessman whose wife left him after the economy went down and he wants revenge for his daughter's death. I think Park thought it would be interesting to have a revenge story against a guy who accidentally killed a girl, but it just didn't work because he is more interested in telling the story than letting us get to know the characters.

It's a shame, really, because he has a good visual style and interesting stories, he just doesn't know how to tell them.