Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (CJ Ent., 2002, S. Korea) is the gratifying, darkly comical first installment in director PARK Chan-wook's so-called Vengeance Trilogy (including 2003's "Oldboy" and 2005's "Lady Vengeance"). I know most people who've seen them all usually favor Oldboy, but Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (SFMV) is my favorite of the three. It doesn't have the slickness of the latter 2 films, but the grit of this movie keeps it grounded, even without any substantial artistic sacrifice.This film shows that desperate times call for desperate measures and how otherwise sympathetic characters get driven to extremes in the face of tragedy. Given the plot, it's hard to tell who "Mr. Vengeance" is exactly as everyone seems pushed to seek revenge in one way or another.So Ryu (SHIN Ha-kyun), a deaf mute factory worker, has been saving the money to buy a kidney for his ailing sister (LIM Ji-Eun). He's an incompatible donor and she's running out of time. Her name is down the hospital's list and so Ryu turns to a sketchy woman and her sons, who promise that for 10,000 Won, Ryu's life savings, they can secure a good kidney for Ryu's sister. Next thing we know, Ryu wakes up broke, naked, empty-handed and without one of *his* kidneys. Frustratingly, the hospital now informs Ryu that a suitable donor's been found, if he has 10 grand for them. On top of all this Mr. Park (SONG Kang-ho), Ryu's boss, downsizes the factory, costing Ryu his job.After kicking his butt for being so rash, Ryu's attractive, leftist girlfriend CHA Yeong-mi (BAE Doona) one-ups him by convincing him that they should kidnap Mr. Park's precious young daughter for ransom to raise the money for the kidney. A series of tragedies, consequences, paybacks and escalations are unleashed one right after the other, with the people involved either covering their rears, seeking retribution or bracing for it, or promising that even if vanquished now, they'll be avenged in the end. And one thing about this movie is that every promise is kept.People will say that Park's depictions of violence are gratuitous or over the top, but violence shouldn't be easy to look at, and Park goes for matter-of-fact depictions that make sense within the story. He never shies away from showing an injury or a person's facial or physiological response to being injured. So if you're squeamish, be warned, watch this before eating or after your take-out is digested.Park also shows, especially as the pace picks up in the 2nd half, how the pretext of defending honor leads to blood lust that makes the main participants indistinguishable from each other in the end. There are certainly villains here and innocents too, and they are not spared from pain, but they operate on the periphery. What you get among the central cast is a spectrum of motivations and decisions that can be understood with different degrees of sympathy within the context of the story.It's difficult to say what exactly Park's stance on all this is. At the beginning of the movie, Ryu's sister's painful moaning arouses a group of horny masturbators next door with their ears pinned to the thin wall. It's an amusing allegory, because this is the type of thing boys with good hearing are using their ears for while the protagonist lives as a deaf mute. At the outset, Ryu is a sympathetic person who makes the best of a hard life. Several sequences are shot from his point of view, forcing the viewer to watch silent lips flap, the lips of people talking at Ryu like he's stupid, though he's smart, almost like they're trying to talk to this guy in slow motion. The difficulty of communication is a basic fact of life for Ryu, so it's easy to see how it would've been neglected in this circumstance.SONG Kang-ho does a masterful job, showing how a father's heart is crushed and hardened transforming a man from a well-regarded, upright citizen into an assassin willing to commit any sin to protect his daughter's honor. The way director Park structures the story doesn't give viewers as much time to get to know PARK Dong-jin, the character, but Park's grief-ridden faces and movements combine with the angelic presence of his little daughter to make the viewer *almost* comfortable with the cold dishes Park serves up.One of the most masterful strengths of this movie is how the direction and acting cause the viewer to feel regret for people who are ready to torture one another to death and how bad we feel about the circumstances that drive them to seek revenge. A morbid hierarchy is reflected in how close (in time and location) one character's death is to another. The bodies almost literally pile up at the same grave, and in the end death gets everybody except the "last one standing," and you'll suspect that it won't be long before that one's pushing up daisies too.

The first chapter of the Vengeance trilogy is a very stylistically filmed and layered movie with themes of revenge, loss, betrayal & guilt very nicely captured on camera by director Chan Wook Park. The first half of the film is relatively slow, out of flow & even seems to be heading towards a disaster but it's the second half where this film starts taking itself more seriously than expected and turns out to be a major improvement, resulting in culminating with a highly satisfying conclusion. The movie is no doubt brutal & bloody but the violence is there for a purpose & you'll know what i mean when you see it yourself. Overall, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is a nicely experimented revenge drama that despite of its shortcomings, remains a much better & satisfying thriller than most of its Hollywood counterparts.

A deaf and dumb man (Ryu) has only his older sister as remaining family. She has helped him get into art school, but fell ill while he was still in the program. She needs a new kidney, but his will not do, since they have conflicting blood types. He works in a sweatshop, double shifts, and clearly does not make much money for this. He decides to go to the black market to sell his kidney.What could possibly go wrong? He gets fired, which moves up his time table. The organ dealers cheat him out of the money they promised him, but do take a kidney. They leave him stark naked in the middle of nowhere. On the other hand, they do find a compatible kidney for his sister, and have it inserted into the donor program. How could this get worse? He does not have the money for the operation itself. His girl friend recommends kidnapping the daughter of the man who fired him for the purpose of ransom. They go through with the kidnapping. This seems to go successfully, but his sister commits suicide over the crime. So, all of the previous activity was for nothing.What story is left? Burying the sister; getting the kidnapped girl back home. His carelessness does not go unpunished. If not for a man more disabled than the protagonist, he might not have even found the body. Of course, this same disabled man tried to steal her necklace, which woke her up, which led to her drowning. He steals that necklace after she's dead.The father of the kidnapped girl sells his company and his house. The police find the apartment where Ryu and his late sister had lived, but they are long gone. Ryu keeps following the dead girl's father around; I'm surprised the cops did not trip over him. The girl's father keeps looking; he finds Ryu's sister's body, and the disabled man who stole his daughter's necklace. The cops get closer. Ryu finds the organ dealers and kills three of them.The girl's father finds Ryu's girlfriend and tortures her using electricity. One of the few high points of the movie was when the girl's father finds the many pictures of his daughter having a happy and fun time with Ryu and his girl friend, the one he's currently torturing. It seemed like a revelation to him. Then one sees it was not. He turns the current back on and goes back to looking at the pictures. She dies from it, but not before revealing she was a terrorist, at least in her own mind, and gives him a promise of retribution. Ryu returns to the apartment as the police take the body out. No one notices him. The police find out about the organ dealers that Ryu murdered. Ryu rides down in the elevator with them and the corpse. Still he is not noticed.Ryu stakes out the girl's father, but the father outsmarts him. He takes Ryu to the spot where his daughter was drowned. He starts explaining, but Ryu is deaf, and he does not know sign language. When he is about to bury Ryu, he gets to receive more vengeance from Ryu's girl friend's organization. They did the job on him that she promised. He still does not get it as he dies.Cinematography: 8/10 Competent. In some sections, there was more than a bit of camera shake.Sound: 8/10 The spoken word is Korean, and the subtitles presented seem to be OK. Some dialog and writing had no subtitles. The actors appear to be adequately miked.Acting: 7/10 Reasonable, but not the best.Screenplay: 8/10 The plot is clear, and the action and dialog moves it along, though slowly. The final minutes make it clear that the build up was worth it.

(this is part 3 of this review - look for part 1 and 2 first)As Park Chan-Wook has explained himself, his trilogy of vengeance is about guilt, or the ways of a guilty conscience. In this first of the three films, he points at guilt by taking it away, by making it absent. Ryu might be taken responsible for kidnapping Yu-sun but her death is a mere accident; even the person causing her to wake up and fall into the water might not be taken responsible, for his severe handicap. And how would we adhere Dong-jin guilt, as he is drawn into this cycle of violence by Ryu? He never asked for this. It just happened to him.(I'm almost done..)Over 'here' (the west), Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance got released after the latter OldBoy and most of it's supposed flaws have been defined as what of Oldboy it is not: less 'signature'- violence, less kinetic cinematography, less story drive, less speed. Also, people complain about the nihilist style, the story-progress where the real events seem to start only halfway the film, and the un-identifiability of it's characters. They are all right, and therefor wrong.OldBoy indeed is what Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is not: there is the good guy/bad guy set-up (with some twists and nuances of shared guilt), the identifiable character (allthough unsympathetic at first, still the victim of the story and therefor our (anti-)hero), flashy scenes of violence, some wickedly imaginative and therefor enjoyable forms of violence, some more sex, a classic three act story structure, nice build-ups of suspense, twists, secrets and revelations, and a climactic ending with big confessions and a one-to-one ultimate fight on a great location. Hurray.Instead, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance has a rhythm and imagery of surgical precision; it's violence is minimalistic, but absolute, and therefor horrific (mistakenly taken as sensational), and not enjoyable. It's story is constructed beyond genius, as I have been trying to prove. It strives to tell more than it's storyline. It's not giving us answers or closed endings. It is not a comfortable film and it's not it's aim to be enjoyable. It's fantastic and compelling nonetheless. Sympathy for Mr Vengeance is a true artistic masterpiece, to be watched over and over again, because it makes you think. It makes you realize. OldBoy is a very, very good night out.