Review of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) by Wes S — 28 Sep 2011

Very bloody revenge film with a great story line and very well written characters. It's a story about a young deaf man Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin) who loves his sister and tries to take care of her when she gets sick and needs a kidney transplant, but doesn't know what to do when he gets fired from his job. With the best intentions, he gives his own kidney along with all his savings to a group of black market organ traffickers in exchange for a kidney compatible with his sister...but ends up getting conned when he wakes up after the surgery and finds that they've disappeared. In steps Ryu's eccentric activist girlfriend Cha Yeong-mi (Doona Bae) with a plan to kidnap his former boss' daughter for ransom, but things go horribly wrong resulting in a never ending bloody tale of revenge when the kidnapping goes sideways and backlashes on everyone involved.

Chan-wook Park is a master at weaving a story about the futility of revenge, which in this film results in a circle of violence for everyone involved. Park does such an amazing job at drawing you into these characters and adding so much depth and complexity to each character...so much so that each person in the story can be the protagonist at one point and the antagonist later on. And this is the tragedy and futility of the story, that both the protagonists and antagonists all have endearing qualities that draw you into the character and you get to see both the good and bad in each person. Altogether this is a poetically tragic revenge film that flows seamlessly with killer performances from all the actors.