That was an excellent one.

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

disgusting, overrated, pointless

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

First in Park Chan-wook's Vengeance trilogy. A movie about a deaf-mute man, whose sister is in dire need of a kidney transplant, but unfortunately the man himself cannot be a donor. Through sheer desperation the man ends up performing deeds best left undone, all in the name of his sister.It's not a pretty movie. The man's, Ryu's (Shin Ha-kyun), actions are understandable to a degree, and one could even argue that he never crosses that final line. Oh, he crosses lines, multiple of them, but he's more pushed over some of them than he is willingly walking. Not that it changes the end results in any way. And that's the "beauty" of it.It's also a brutal movie. A lot of gore and blood is shown, the film certainly could be called tasteless by more conservative viewers and it certainly is not for everyone. But then again, you're watching a Park Chan-wook film. What did you expect? You either like his style or you don't.The biggest problem I have with the film is the way it flows. Or to be more specific, how the scenes are joined together. There is more than one scene where you end up having no idea how the characters got there. That man shouldn't have that information or how did that guy find this guy or wasn't that girl supposed to be there instead of here. Those kinds of things. And yes, it's mood over logic kind of film, but most of these scenes could have easily been made to work with a line of dialogue. There's no need for it to be this clunky.Still, it's a powerful film. Unapologetic, stylish and definitely memorable. It's not quite Oldboy, the second film of the trilogy, but if you liked that film, then this one should be right up your alley as well.

Director Chan-wook Park presents his talent in visual story-telling in this twisted Crime-Drama of a fired factory worker, who kidnaps his former boss's daughter. Collaborating with his favorite actor of choice Kanf-ho Song, the director is able to improve "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" progression with on-going running time before all the accumulated energy suddenly breaks out at around 85 Minutes into the movie. Some skillful scenes of murder action emerges without shying away of showing the violence within the human condition, yet avoiding the trap of glorifying the torturing acts, where Director Chan-wook Park shows taste and respect for the audiovisual art form of motion pictures, which already peaked with his international breakthrough picture "Oldboy" (2003) the year after.© 2017 Felix Alexander Dausend (Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC)

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.

(this is part 3 of this review - look for part 1 and 2 first)As Park Chan-Wook has explained himself, his trilogy of vengeance is about guilt, or the ways of a guilty conscience. In this first of the three films, he points at guilt by taking it away, by making it absent. Ryu might be taken responsible for kidnapping Yu-sun but her death is a mere accident; even the person causing her to wake up and fall into the water might not be taken responsible, for his severe handicap. And how would we adhere Dong-jin guilt, as he is drawn into this cycle of violence by Ryu? He never asked for this. It just happened to him.(I'm almost done..)Over 'here' (the west), Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance got released after the latter OldBoy and most of it's supposed flaws have been defined as what of Oldboy it is not: less 'signature'- violence, less kinetic cinematography, less story drive, less speed. Also, people complain about the nihilist style, the story-progress where the real events seem to start only halfway the film, and the un-identifiability of it's characters. They are all right, and therefor wrong.OldBoy indeed is what Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is not: there is the good guy/bad guy set-up (with some twists and nuances of shared guilt), the identifiable character (allthough unsympathetic at first, still the victim of the story and therefor our (anti-)hero), flashy scenes of violence, some wickedly imaginative and therefor enjoyable forms of violence, some more sex, a classic three act story structure, nice build-ups of suspense, twists, secrets and revelations, and a climactic ending with big confessions and a one-to-one ultimate fight on a great location. Hurray.Instead, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance has a rhythm and imagery of surgical precision; it's violence is minimalistic, but absolute, and therefor horrific (mistakenly taken as sensational), and not enjoyable. It's story is constructed beyond genius, as I have been trying to prove. It strives to tell more than it's storyline. It's not giving us answers or closed endings. It is not a comfortable film and it's not it's aim to be enjoyable. It's fantastic and compelling nonetheless. Sympathy for Mr Vengeance is a true artistic masterpiece, to be watched over and over again, because it makes you think. It makes you realize. OldBoy is a very, very good night out.