Lady Vengeance -- 2005 -- R

The final film of the vengeance trilogy I approached with high hopes, praying that the lessons learned from Oldboy would carry through. I was wrong. Oldboy was an exception. While Lady Vengeance doesn't repeat the most grievous error of the first film, we are often treated to long scenes of mundane tasks, like people eating, for several minutes.

As a side note, I did find it interesting that there was this green paperish stuff that you put in your rice and when you fold it into the rice, it's easier to pick up a mouthful of rice with chopsticks. I don't know what the green stuff is (rice paper?), but it's use was fascinating to me. Yes, this is something I learned from the movie.

Anyway, the plot follows a girl convicted of kidnapping and killing a 5 year old boy (what does this guy have against children?), so she is locked up for 13 years in a women's prison. When she gets out, she apparently has this elaborate plan worked up that she had shared with several of her prisonmates who she befriended because while in prison, she displayed an angelic presence. Much to the surprise of nearly everyone, she drops this facade as soon as she gets out, donning blood red eye shadow and starting her mission.

We aren't given a large number of clues to begin with, just a slew of names and other info about these people that is really hard to keep track of. The point of all the names was that our girl used each of the people she met as a piece of an elaborate puzzle to create what she wanted to get her vengeance on what I assumed early on to be the guy who framed her for the murder, though more information comes out as we move onward to further deepen her cause.

I will throw out at this point that the disc I was watching skipped really bad and when I reset my DVD player to see if it would move past that point, it ended up skipping the entire second act of the film that I had to go back and watch after I watched the ending (boy, was I confused for awhile there).

After all the initial introduction, the movie strays into irrelevant land where the girl has a daughter who was adopted by a family in Australia. She goes to see her daughter, and after a drunken evening with her adopted parents, they agree (for some weird, unknown reason) to let the girl (who speaks no Korean) to accompany our heroine to Seoul to hang out for a few days. Turns out while the section of the movie I accidentally skipped does contain important plot info near the end, the central section was really slow, and I about considered myself done with the movie a couple of times before forcing myself to at figure out how we got to where I'd started in the third act after my DVD skip.

This was the part of the movie containing the overlong eating scene where I learned about the green paper stuff. While I understood the relevance of what happened in that scene, and get its overall impact, it needed to be cut down...badly.

Once we got into the third act, it was rather good and even disturbing. If getting there wasn't such a chore, it would have been that much better.

So this third vengeance film is very mixed in regards to how it played out. It needed a lot of cuts to keep the pacing up since we had way too much menial work to stare at when a film needs to keep moving to maintain interest. If it had a few cuts here and there, it would actually be fairly decent, since the plot itself is rather good.