Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance -- 2002 -- R

Would you believe I have sixteen movies backed up that I haven't reviewed yet? I'm going to try and get through a lot of these today, but I know I won't get all of them. I'll start with this Korean Vengeance trilogy from Chan-wook Park.

The opening film is Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and this is not a film that made much of a splash for me. I ended up watching this group of films for a couple of reasons: one was because the second film, Oldboy, was on IMDB's top 250; the second was because the title of this one was on the byline of someone's avatar. But the film itself? Nothing to write home about.

Our basic plot does inspire some sympathy and would create some wish for vengeance in this character. You have a deaf guy who desperately wants to help his sister who is dying of problems with her kidney (I believe). He finds some people who promise organs on demand, and when he goes to them, he learns that it's a trade for one of his organs plus some money (all he has saved for the operation should a legitimate kidney become available). Well, of course, the people take his kidney and money, he never hears from them again, and within a week, there's a kidney donor available...but he doesn't have the money.

What to do? Well, he concocts a plan with his girlfriend (who heads up a Korean terrorist organization) to kidnap a child and ransom her off to her rich exec father for the money he needs for the operation. It seems like a clean, cut and dry operation: keep the kid happy until daddy pays up. Well, trouble rears its ugly head again when dead guy's sister finds out about the kidnapping and kills herself while deaf guy is out getting the money. As if it couldn't get any worse, the movie takes its first major downturn when he goes off to bury his sister in their favorite place and the kid wanders into the water and drowns. This is where my Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance ends. Now, I'm rooting for the kid's father.

This movie's major problem is that it is either slow or annoying or occasionally both at the same time. The characters and situations are very clever, and I certainly can't fault the creativity, but the execution is so flawed, it's difficult to pay attention to the movie. Pacing lags very frequently, and I don't even understand the disabled guy at the lake. The director has us stare at mundane tasks forever, and doesn't even give us anything suspenseful to pay attention to so we don't get bored watching people eat.

The other problem is what I mentioned in the plot: I lost all interest in the plight of the main character as soon as the kid died. I understand he didn't hear her, but I honestly can't see her wandering into the lake and trying to swim, when there was a bridge that spanned the entire width of the lake, and our Mr. Vengeance crossed it both ways. So who is going to draw the audience's cheers more? The guy who lost a kidney to some thieves (oh, it sucks bad; don't get me wrong), but killed a kid trying to steal the money from someone who had nothing to do with it. Or will it be the guy whose child was killed by a kidnapper after you paid the ransom? This isn't rocket science.

Naturally, the movie turns into a dual vengeance film once the father starts trying to track down his child's killer, and we get both tales running simultaneously from then on. Some of it is quite good, but those two speed bumps are hard to recover from.

So this is a film that barely works. If its execution were top notch, it would likely be a lot better (though we'd have issues with the construction of the plot), so while we'd complain about the shift in protagonist, at least we wouldn't be bored while watching it...so very, very bored.