MOVIE REVIEW: Chan-wook Park's entire 'Vengeance Trilogy' -- on the big screen in Portland


For The Oregonian ...




Portland's Living Room Theaters is showing one jaw-dropper of a triple-feature. The cinema lounge is screening Chan-wook Park's entire "Vengeance Trilogy" -- "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," "Oldboy" and "Lady Vengeance."

It's an incredible chance to catch all three of these merciless, tragic and deeply weird South Korean revenge thrillers on the big screen.

Writer-director Park is the brightest star of what's been called "the New Korean Cinema." He started out as a film critic, worked his way behind the camera, and scored a hit in 2000 with "Joint Security Area," a murder mystery set in Korea's DMZ.

He used the resulting box-office clout to fund a personal obsession with revenge stories -- specifically, revenge stories set in a modern world ill-suited to vendettas. Each chapter in the resulting "Trilogy" is a tightly plotted puzzle about at least one antihero who finds out -- in the nastiest way possible -- that retribution can't soothe his or her soul:

• "Mr. Vengeance" (2002) tells the story of a deaf-and-dumb blue-collar schmuck (Ha-kyun Shin) looking to even the score with black-market organ brokers. In the process, a kidnapping goes awry, awakening the slow wrath of the abductee's father (Kang-ho Song).

• The cult smash "Oldboy" (2003) follows the rampage of a businessman (Min-sik Choi) hunting the man who imprisoned him in a room for 15 years. That hunt leads to twisted, audience-testing revelations -- as well as an already-classic, single-take action scene in which our hero, armed with a claw hammer, takes on a dozen men in a cramped hallway. (I wrote about "Oldboy" at greater length here.)

• Park concludes the trilogy with the surreal "Lady Vengeance" (2005), in which a woman (Young-Ae Lee), falsely imprisoned on a kidnap-murder charge, concocts an elaborate plan to snare the real kidnapper. But what should be a cathartic payoff becomes profoundly disturbing as innocent victims are drawn into her plot.

All three movies feature Park's unique combination of horror, beauty, pitch-black wit, fearless lead performances and bursts of ultraviolence (involving bats, blades, bullets and worse) that would feel cartoonish if they weren't woven into such deeply felt storylines.

If you're going to see only one of these, catch "Oldboy": It's the most outrageous and entertaining of the trilogy. But watching all three in order is an exhausting revelation. Over the course of the series, Park develops his style and varies his theme, even as he's weaving in motifs that include everything from snatches of dialogue to consistently silly haircuts. These are brilliant, uncompromising pictures -- the best ticket in town, if you've got the stomach.
_____

"Mr. Vengeance": B-plus, 129 mins., R for strong gruesome violence, strong sexuality, language and drug use.

"Oldboy": A, 120 mins., R for strong violence including scenes of torture, sexuality and pervasive language.

"Lady Vengeance": B, 112 mins., R for strong violent content -- some involving children -- and some sexuality.

'Vengeance Trilogy' (The Oregonian, May 25, 2007)

Living Room Theaters: now playing

Permalink


Posted: Thu - June 7, 2007 at 09:23 PM        

|

©