Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance

Although there's absolutely no question Oldboy is the better film, Sympathy is much better than the critics are giving it credit for. For one thing, its take on vengeance/vigilante justice is one of the most sobering and unsettling I've ever seen on film. As with Oldboy, there's a wonderfully healthy sense of absurdity in many of the scenes that really seems unique to this director, and I'm excited to see what he does with Lady Vengeance, and future films. His visual style is mostly superb, if not always focused on plot. One reviewer said that by the second half of the film, the director's talent is wasted on shock value as one awful killing follows another, but Park seems to use the non-stop intensity as an expressionistic storytelling technique rather than an end in itself, which I can't find any problem with.It has its flaws, and I'd probably give it a B, but it's still one of the more exciting and original films coming out of Asia in the last few years.