{"id":6083,"date":"2007-04-29T09:22:59","date_gmt":"2007-04-29T13:22:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=6083"},"modified":"2007-04-29T09:22:59","modified_gmt":"2007-04-29T13:22:59","slug":"sympathy-for-mr-vengeance-boksuneun-naui-geot-2002","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2007\/04\/29\/sympathy-for-mr-vengeance-boksuneun-naui-geot-2002\/","title":{"rendered":"Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Boksuneun naui geot) (2002)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sympathy-for-mr-vengeanc\"<\/a>Perhaps I wasn\u2019t paying attention, or perhaps I was just falling asleep after the first hour of nothing, but I couldn\u2019t understand about sixty percent of what occurred in \u201cSympathy for Mr. Vengeance.\u201d Whether or not Park actually tells the story jumping from different time to time, I\u2019ll never know, because characters I thought died pop up later, and events that suddenly never happened, leads to something unexpected. Park\u2019s story is awfully disjointed to the point where I couldn\u2019t even catch up.<\/p>\n

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. So, I was lost for a good portion of the time. Otherwise, \u201cSympathy for Mr. Vengeance\u201d is never as interesting as Park intends it to be, and that\u2019s 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. I wanted to love \u201cSympathy for Mr. Vengeance,\u201d and even during utterly cringe-inducing violence like an Achilles tendon being sliced in half, and a grueling electrocution, it\u2019s all just so dull and forgettable.<\/p>\n

Park has many valuable insights to shed with his films, and one of the main themes of his Vengeance trilogy, from the utterly magnificent \u201cOldboy,\u201d to his sub-par \u201cMr. Vengeance,\u201d seems to be that if you seek an eye for an eye, you\u2019ll 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\u2019s made stylized without being cartoonish. In spite of it all, \u201cMr. Vengeance\u201d 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\u2019ve committed it.<\/p>\n

The characters in Wook\u2019s \u201cMr. Vengeance\u201d are ugly, and gruesome, and this keeps the story grounded in reality once the body count rises. Wook\u2019s 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. Here, Park is simply not there. With \u201cOldboy\u201d there was an indefinable energy, where as \u201cMr. Vengeance\u201d 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, \u201cSympathy for Mr. Vengeance\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Perhaps I wasn\u2019t paying attention, or perhaps I was just falling asleep after the first hour of nothing, but I couldn\u2019t understand about sixty percent of what occurred in \u201cSympathy for Mr. Vengeance.\u201d Whether or not Park actually tells the story jumping from different time to time, I\u2019ll never know, because characters I thought died […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[113,240,302,367,840,885,922,1087],"class_list":["post-6083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-asian","tag-crime","tag-drama","tag-foreign","tag-revenge","tag-s","tag-sequel","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}