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September 16, 2005 > Arts & Entertainment > Film offers raw, ultra-violent look at ‘Vengeance’

Film offers raw, ultra-violent look at ‘Vengeance’

By Mike Mathews | Thresher staff

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the new film from Korean director Chan-wook Park, clings desperately to the revenge film model. And while Park has obviously considered more than just the nominal aspects of the genre, somehow the film still comes up short.

Chan-wook’s film presents the story of Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin), a deaf, mute, low-class worker who, upon being laid-off by his boss, Park Dong-jin (Kang-ho Song), resolves to kidnap Park’s grade-school daughter to obtain money for his sister’s (Ji-Eun Lim) kidney transplant. Everything becomes more complicated when underground organ dealers rob Ryu of his last significant sum of money. With the help of his girlfriend, Cha Yeong-mi (Du-na Bae), Ryu kidnaps the girl without any malevolent intentions — he only asks for the sum of money he needs, does not harm Park and wins the love of Park’s daughter. Despite this benevolence, Park’s daughter dies by accident while with Ryu.

Without a doubt, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance attains a level of aestheticism far above that of most other revenge films, such as the Death Wish series, which at best cloak sheer exploitation behind trite and oversimplified morals. In addition to Marxist undertones surrounding the tension between the characters’ different economic statuses, Mr. Vengeance provides a glimpse of the characters’ inner conflicts, allowing the viewer to identify with them and their reasons for committing such flagrant acts. However, Chan-wook does not allow these auxiliary conflicts to play an active role in the narrative. Although the director succeeds in involving the viewer in the dynamic and well-paced plot, his intentions fail with respect to character development.

The humanity of both protagonists is conveyed intermittently throughout the film. Ryu and Park are shown as ordinary people unprepared for their personal affliction. Ryu loves his sister dearly, and Park is devoted to his work and daughter. Nonetheless, Chan-wook undermines this sympathetic portrayal with the protagonists’ macabre acts of revenge. Ryu still pursues another target for murder after slaughtering three organ dealers with a baseball bat and eating their kidneys. And Park ties Cha to a chair and puts her through several rounds of electrocution. The film reaches a desensitizing level of excessive violence — a la Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City — so redundant that it ultimately renders the film meaningless.

This problem is probably not a consequence of Chan-wook mistakenly thinking his demands upon the viewer are reasonable. Instead, Chan-wook preoccupies himself with satisfying fans of the revenge film. He sacrifices too much after the exposition stage of the plot — emotions and character relationships, for example — to show only how the protagonists avenge themselves.

Many of the film’s strong elements fall flat as a result of this forfeiture of deeper insight. For example, Chan-wook raises the issue of the context of the narrative relative to the viewer, as the camera shifts from an omniscient to a first-person perspective during several key moments in film. But this and other inspired visual aspects of the storytelling amount to little in light of the film’s obsessive focus on vengeance.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance could have been a beautiful, shrewd human commentary in the form of a revenge film. Instead, Chan-wook gives his audiences a self-absorbed bloodbath of retribution with little underlying meaning. But while Chan-wook’s style makes the technical aspects of the film worth seeing, the lack of substance makes Vengeance a hard film to sympathize with.

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