SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

abednasser I didn't like this movie at all, sometimes I got lost during watching it as the plot was not clear, but most of all I hate its ultra-violence

bondblackberry 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.

PeaceGuard 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.

CinemaClown The first chapter of the Vengeance trilogy is a very stylistically filmed and layered movie with themes of revenge, loss, betrayal & guilt very nicely captured on camera by director Chan Wook Park. The first half of the film is relatively slow, out of flow & even seems to be heading towards a disaster but it's the second half where this film starts taking itself more seriously than expected and turns out to be a major improvement, resulting in culminating with a highly satisfying conclusion. The movie is no doubt brutal & bloody but the violence is there for a purpose & you'll know what i mean when you see it yourself. Overall, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is a nicely experimented revenge drama that despite of its shortcomings, remains a much better & satisfying thriller than most of its Hollywood counterparts.