Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

If you've ever been poor if you ever had to work by a dirty machine for minimum wages just to be able to stay alive, you'll appreciate that director Chan-wook Park knows something about the pure desperation such conditions can bring about. And if you've ever lost somebody that you truly loved more than yourself, the most emotional scene in this film will probably make you cry.
Vengeance is one of humanity's more lamentable instincts, and one we'll have to overcome as a species one day. When one acts out of vengeance one seeks only to hurt, and when people start hurting each other because they're hurt themselves, everybody ends up hurting and nobody really gains anything. That's what happens when the main character's lack of one sense drives the film, both form and function wise. Occasionally, we lose one of the two ways in which we interact with the film (sound, sight). The loss of one sense adds value to the other. It makes the normally assumed other seem all the more there. Unlike most Hollywood takes on this particular sense absence, we get a bit of a glimpse into what the absence means to the character, and not just what it means to us looking at the character as third person. What results are some very nice moments that are film using itself as a medium to one of its potentials.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is a very original and well-done film. It takes a very common theme(especially for Asian films...) - revenge - and turns it on it's head. Usually in a revenge-style film, there are clear-cut "good guys" and "bad guys". The good guy is wronged and seeks vengeance against the bad buy - end of film. But SYMPATHY is very different, as there are several people wronged in one way or another, and the only clear-cut "bad guys" may be the shady organ dealers (explained below), but are really just bit players in a much larger and more complex picture. SYMPATHY is really a sad film of desperation, and the lengths that individuals may go to for family.
This is the story of Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin). Ryu is both deaf and mute. He has a sister (Ji-Eun Lim) that needs a kidney transplant. Ryu lost his job, therefore he has no money to pay for a legal transplant. So he tries to buy a kidney from the black market, but he is fooled by the smugglers and loses his own kidney and the little amount of money he had. Then his girlfriend, Cha Yeong-mi (Donna Bae), gives Ryu the idea to kidnap his former boss', Park Dong- jin (Kang-ho Song), daughter, Yu-sun (Bo-bae Han). What follows then is a series of events, all evolving acts of revenge and violence. Being a part of the 'Vengeance Trilogy', you would expect that the script is about revenge, but the story Park and his crew created is truly amazing. I'm not gonna spoil it here, but the script takes a few terrific, mind-blowing turns. The characters make weird but real decisions, which provokes a chain of events that you won't believe. The dialogs are also quite well written, so is the rest of the movie. There is also quite a nice share of touching scenes, and also lots of violent and bloody ones. In my opinion, the screenplay is for sure the strongest point of 'Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance'.
The film is comfortably uncertain of its genre and impartial to the characters it follows on such a subjective journey as a mortal vendetta. Think of how contrived it would have to be though, in order to submit to more widely accessible conventions. Watching this film, we realize why it's difficult in some revenge tales to make one character sympathetic and the other rotten to the core. No matter what impression we get of them, there are still certain things that could happen to them that require a kind of justice society is not made to allow. If the film remained purely within the confines of a thriller, it could not have seize and squeeze all the dramatic, comic and voyeuristic possibilities of each scene.