I am a fan of thriller movies, especially the South Korean ones. Of the various movies, this is the worst of the lot. There is no thriller in the first place and the movie is plain and simple. A guy kidnaps a child for money with assistance from his girlfriend. He does for a good cause and everything goes according to plan, but a sudden twist flips everything upside down with the child accidentally kills herself. The father of the victim hunts for the kidnapper, and the pursuit was boring to say the least. There are many thriller/crime movies, but this movie is nothing but a Quentin Tarantino drama. I don't recommend this movie to anyone for a gripping thriller movie.

"Boksuneun naui geot" or "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" is a 2-hour movie from South Korea that will have its 15th anniversary next year. The (co-)writer and director is Chan-wook Park, one of Asia's most lauded filmmakers these days and his film here is actually the first of a trilogy that also includes the famous "Oldboi". Unfortunately, I cannot say that watching this one here got me curious about Park's other works. I see not much talent in here, just the intention to be controversial and graphic for the sake of it, not for the sake of telling a great story.The only reason to respect or even like this film here is probably if you see it from a fantasy perspective. None of the action or horror in here is really realistic and something that could happen in real life. This is quite a shame though as the film starts with an interesting premise, namely a couple who plans to abduct the child from a rich man in order to extort money from him that they need for the urgent surgery of a beloved. And that's also how they try to justify their crime, to each other and also to the audience.However, things do not go as planned and it turns into a chaotic, sadistic bloody mess for the rest of the film. Maybe this would have worked better as a short film as the script simply wasn't good enough for a film that crosses the 2-hour mark. There was really little dialogue in here I must say. This is also an aspect that hurt my general perception of the film. I need characters to interact with each other, but i guess Park thought this would make the film more appreciative to foreign audiences if there is not too much Korean talk. Anyway, as you probably already know by now, I did not enjoy the watch and I do not recommend you checking this one out. Thumbs down.

I know that with 7,7 current overall rating, most people will not agree with me, especially Tarantino-Rodriguez fans. But my opinion is this.The movie is highly unrealistic, half-baked, has some major flaws and blanks and rationally it more often doesn't make sense than it does. You can say how beautiful are the interlacing threads of love, hate and vengeance, but in the end it doesn't have much meaning if everything else is just one big mistake.Let's be more specific here and make some examples. The deaf boy's sister kills herself because of the "asian honor thing", as a result of knowing about the kidnapping. Well.. let's just hope other people won't act like that, because everyone would kill themselves because of some reason they find morally unacceptable. The deaf boy doesn't help the girl at all, because "he thought the water was deep". The pair does not hide after the girl's death and they even send some message and photos to the radio (which, of course, Mr. Vengeance has to accidentally hear). Everyone find everyone in this movie, just like that, like the addresses of the people they look for are written in a phone book. A pathologist performs an autopsy of a girl before the eyes of his father.. what? And later he's even present during an autopsy of a girl who's completely strange to him, is this a joke? The father (I suppose he's the "Mr. Vengeance") kills the waiter who comes to deliver the food for no reason. The police doesn't arrest that guy the moment he kills the deaf boy's girlfriend.. they seem not to know who did this at all.But the moral part of the movie is the worst. It glorifies (well.. maybe that's an overstatement, but it surely doesn't disapprove it in any way) self-appointed vengeance. It suggests that death of two people (well.. three) by torture is the right way to answer for a kidnapping and a negligent homicide. The guy exploits his workers if a factory, where they have breaks lasting 10 seconds. He does not pay them enough to make a living. He has no empathy for a worker who begs him to help and later for his whole dead family too. But he still says "he thinks he's always lived uprightly" and morally justifies what he does throughout the movie. This is just a sick, radical-Muslim-alike thinking.I've watched this movie, because I thought that this director has done other movies which would be as good as Oldboy, or at least at the level of Stoker. But in this case I was wrong. I'm not some king of drastic scenes opponent, but it seems to me like this movie has just nothing more to offer and that makes it trashy.No.. I have no sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Both as a character and as a movie. It's been one of the worst movies I've seen lately.

For anyone reading this review and considering watching this movie, please immediately switch your attention to, "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance", which is twice the movie Mr. Vengeance is. My reasoning? I am not a native Korean and I found it difficult to follow the time-line and individual characters watching with English subtitles. The same issue arose with Lady Vengeance but the simple ploy of Lady Vengeance wearing distinctive red eye-shadow meant she was always easily identifiable. I do not wish to sound in any way racist but when every Korean person in these movies is virtually identical - ladies with homogeneous height, body shape, hair colour and make-up, men with the same dark side-shade and suits (although one character in Mr. Vengeance has green hair) - it is very difficult for non-Asians to follow just exactly who everybody is and their importance to the plot when using English subtitles.Both Mr. and Lady are dark movies which depict the less-well-off areas and people of South Korea. Both movies show grim realities that are a reflection of SK culture and religious beliefs - to me it is a cross between old-school American evangelicalism and old-school Japanese cultural rigidity (apologies to Koreans for liking them to Japanese and vice-versa). There are scenes in both movies but particularly Mr. Vengeance that I cannot envisage being shown in western movie theatres (two "niche" sex-scenes and very believable torture). Overall I found Lady Vengeance more coherent, less depraved and Lady Vengeance infused me with sympathies that quite honestly did not manifest in Mr. Vengeance - so Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is a complete failure in that my true sympathies lay with the characters upon whom vengeance was visited, not the "righteously indignant" party. Mr. Vengeance - 6/10 Lady Vengeance - 8.5/10