Lady Vengeance

Here's the third and final part of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy, and I'm disappointed to say it was easily my least favorite of the three. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy were more raw and realistic in their various choreographed acts of violence; this movie, by contrast, at times felt like a bad Kill Bill knock-off. And I never really identified with the main character's plight this time around. She's been framed for a murder she didn't commit, but she was an accessory to that crime, so the revenge she seeks - against the true murderer - never really seems fully justifiable from a personal level. On the other hand, it's completely justifiable in a vacuum. The guy she seeks to kill is a total monster. Bluntly stated, he kidnaps children and films himself killing them while they cry and scream for their mothers. I can stomach most things in movies, but that was pretty tough to watch - and so were the parents' reactions to the videos they eventually saw.

Like I said, the guy is a monster and deserves everything our heroine has in store for him. But what of this titular Lady Vengeance herself? She's a complex character, for sure. Guilty of some serious shit, but trying to atone for it. Kind-hearted to some and ice cold to others. Remorseful, but hell-bent on torture and death. It just didn't all come together and work for me. Maybe I missed some subtle character-building moments, like a certain tone or inflection lost in the subtitles, but it was never clear to me whether or not I was supposed to be rooting for this woman. Tack on a mother-daughter relationship that seemed more like length-padding than story-building, and I'm a bit stuck when trying to see a thematic bigger picture.

Oh, and there were some weirdly tacky-looking transitions and other strange editing choices early on. Park's always been great at framing his shots and telling his stories more visually than with dialogue, but this movie got a little too hallucination-heavy and surreal at times for my liking. Apparently, the movie originally had a feature-length slow fade into black-and-white, where everything starts out bright and colorful and then loses saturation for the next two hours. That would have been pretty cool, I think! And it would have lent itself very well to the progression of the tone and tenor; we start out with a seemingly reformed woman being released form prison, and we end up with the brutal murder of a kid-killer, after all. I suppose I could have replicated the effect by turning the color down a notch every few minutes, but it just didn't matter that much to me I guess.

Anyway, long story short, this was a fine movie, but it didn't quite live up to what I'd come to expect from Park.