Mr. Vendetta

El Biffo

Objectively speaking, this is good cinema, but too much graphic violence and blood for me. I don't know if I can watch the rest of the trilogy. I probably shouldn't. It would be safer for me to stick to my old black and white films; they almost never have so much blood. This story could have been told without it, and quite beautifully, as evidenced by the earlier scenes, before all of the blood.

HKFanatic

12 years ago, I would have told you this was my favorite Park Chan-wook film, and it's precisely the kind of movie I enjoyed in my early twenties: full of pitiful and pitiable characters caught in a fatalistic loop of violence. I like to think both myself and Park have grown in the ensuing years, but to say there's still a visceral thrill when Shin Ha-kyun enacts his revenge with a baseball bat is an understatement.

Michael H. CLAES

MORE YELLING THAN TELLING. Graphic manga style & successive short shots, PARK, using clichés & gesticulations (& also slowness), tells this neurotic & PRETENTIOUS melodrama of organ trafficking & crime. === PLUS DE CRIS QUE DE DITS. Dans un style manga graphique avec courts plans successifs, PARK, à force clichés & gesticulations (& aussi lenteurs) raconte ce mélo névrosé & PRETENTIEUX de trafic d'organes & de crime.

Jason

Firstly: it has one of the greatest titles in the history of cinema. Secondly: for something that is nominally genre cinema, it is designed, fussed over, and ultimately built floor-to-ceiling like a serious-as-fuck art movie. And it is serious. Though deserving, I guess, of its hallowed fanboy status, the subject of the thing (and its dramatic scale) compare easily to Sophocles and Shakespeare.

msmichel

The first entry in Park Chan-wok's 'revenge' trilogy is an exceptionally well plotted tale about the aftermath of guilt and the downward spiral of revenge. There is a somewhat absurdist touch to the violence portrayed as each act begets another. Performances are quite good as is the visual panache in storytelling. Though eclipsed by the following 'Oldboy' this first entry is nearly as powerful.

comeandsee

Park Chan-Wook at or near his best, visually inventive, engaging and mixing well between trauma, emotion and black humour. He gets across the main message that violence leads to more violence, as he does in the entire duration of his masterpiece trilogy. This is just a master working at top capability.

Palmat

This movie is both heart breaking and harrowing at the same time. The exploration of desperation and grief is sometimes hard to watch but the movie packs a powerful punch that will leave you reeling for days. This is the most grounded (and therefore the best) entry in Park's trilogy and Song and Shin is extraordinary in their performances.

Christopher M. Jones

It's not as upsetting as Oldboy in a visceral sense, but it's about as fucking mean of a film as I've ever seen. Wook is the modern master of tragedy in the classical sense.