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Park has many valuable insights to shed with
his films, and one of the main themes of his Vengeance trilogy, from the
utterly magnificent “Oldboy,” to his sub-par “Mr. Vengeance,” seems to
be that if you seek an eye for an eye, you’ll end up with a lot of blind
people. Or in other words, vengeance and revenge ends with a lot of
bodies and very little resolution. So seems to be the common message for
films he’s made stylized without being cartoonish. In spite of it all,
“Mr. Vengeance” is a fascinating insight into the concept of revenge and
how different people within this story seek it only to discover there is
little satisfaction in it, nor is there anything to be proud of once
you’ve committed it. The characters in Wook’s “Mr. Vengeance” are ugly,
and gruesome, and this keeps the story grounded in reality once the body
count rises. Wook’s direction is, as always a combination of gruesome
and surreal, and he manages to invoke a sense of sweetness and disgust
within every frame, and the horrible torture the ensues for some of the
characters we set down on.
Perhaps I wasn’t paying attention, or
perhaps I was just falling asleep after the first hour of nothing, but I
couldn’t understand about sixty percent of what occurred in “Sympathy
for Mr. Vengeance.” Whether or not Park actually tells the story jumping
from different time to time, I’ll never know, because characters I
thought died pop up later, and events that suddenly never happened,
leads to something unexpected. Park’s story is awfully disjointed to the
point where I couldn’t even catch up. So, rather than rewinding and
trying to find a way in all the sub-plots, I instead just let it lead me
where it intended to, and stopped trying.
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So, I was lost for a good
portion of the time.
Otherwise, “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” is
never as interesting as Park intends it to be, and that’s
because we follow characters that are kept at a safe
distance. Characters like Ryu, who is never sympathetic or
tragic, and the odd mentally disabled man that popped in and
out of the movie, all of it was just so cold and dull. The
attempts to garner an organ on the black market, his
attempts to get a better job, and his relationship with his
roommate, all just end up becoming soulless and tedious.
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I wanted to love “Sympathy for Mr.
Vengeance,” and even during utterly cringe-inducing violence like an
Achilles tendon being sliced in half, and a grueling electrocution,
it’s all just so dull and forgettable. Park is simply not there.
With “Oldboy” there was an indefinable energy, where as “Mr.
Vengeance” is struggling for an identity. Is it a drama, a thriller,
or a revenge tale? I could never figure it out.
In spite of the message Wook shares,
“Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” is a disappointing, dull, and often tedious
examination of different people seeking different forms of revenge in a
life filled with dead ends, and tragedy.
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