I put off watching "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" for months. Why, I don''t know. After all, it has the alluring title of "Sympathy
for Mr. Vengeance." It''s by Chan-wook Park, who did the intriguing "Oldboy." And it''s a revenge film... and I like revenge films.
Regardless, "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" has finally been viewed by my beautiful eyes and what an impressive film it is. A sad, disturbing and methodically violent film, "Sympathy" follows the acts of Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin), a well-intentioned idiot who, after unsuccessfully selling his kidney on the black market to pay for his sister''s much-needed surgery, decides to kidnap the daughter of his rich ex-boss Park Dong-jin (Kang-ho Song) for ransom. With the help of his girlfriend, Ryu almost pulls off the perfect crime, but at the last moment a terrible and accidental tragedy causes everything to go wrong. Suddenly, Ryu is without a sister or a kidney, and Dong-jin is without his daughter, and the two men engage in a spiral of increasingly violent and bloodthirsty quest for vengeance.
"Sympathy" takes a very long time to live up to its title, but the movie works from beginning to end regardless. A film clearly about how even ordinary and well-intentioned people can do absolutely horrible things, Chan-wook takes his time establishing his characters and allowing us to care for people who will inevitably end up getting into a situation where they''re going to try to murder each other.