Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)

Review by Sean Patterson



I finally made my way around to watching the first movie in Chan-wook Park's vengeance trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. It's easy to see the roots of the other two movies, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, here. The movie is more linear, more visceral, and features less of Park's trademark surrealism than its successors. I'd place Mr. Vengeance in the middle of the trilogy in terms of my personal enjoyment. I found it more decipherable than the cerebral Lady Vengeance, but it would be tough to outshine the masterpiece that is Oldboy.
Ryu is a young deaf man who works long hours at a factory job to make money for his ailing sister. She needs a kidney transplant and when he is fired, Ryu uses his severance pay to make a deal with black market organ sellers. Instead of finding a kidney for his sister, they take his money and one of his kidneys. To make matters worse, a legitimate kidney donor is found for his sister, and now he doesn't have the money to pay for the operation.
To come up with the funds, he and his anarchist girlfriend hatch a plan to kidnap a rich executive's daughter and ransom her. Obviously, things go wrong, and we watch as the executive (played by Kang-ho Song, star of The Host and Park's Thirst) methodically goes about getting revenge on Ryu and his girlfriend while Ryu plots his own revenge against the organ sellers who screwed him.
As usual for a Park movie, there are no good guys here. The only person I found myself rooting for was whoever hadn't gotten their revenge yet, as they all deserved it.
Almost a decade on, Park's gift for using the camera to capture beautiful imagery is on full display. The trail of blood and violence that comprises the latter third of the movie is gruesome, but, true to form, enough is left to the imagination to make it profoundly disturbing.
The music in Mr. Vengeance is not the pretty classical type the Park has become fond of for his more recent movies. Instead, what little there is is strange, noisy, and atmospheric. I thought the near-lack of music was odd for a director who has made music such a part of his other movies (I'll never again hear Vivaldi's winter portion of Four Seasons without thinking of Oldboy), but the pretty girl I watched the movie with correctly pointed out that it fit well with a main character who was deaf.
The only complaint I have is the rather silly ending that left me laughing. That's not to say the ending isn't gory and violent, just that the unexpectedly pitch-black punchline was jarring.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is the perfect starting point in the vengeance trilogy, being more straightforward than the other two movies and setting the tone for all of them. I do recommend watching them in order, to see Park's evolution as a director and writer. I simply can't wait for more from Chan-wook Park, as he has quickly become one of my favorite living directors.