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Sympathy For Lady Vengeance aka Chinjeolhan geumjassi
Running time: 112 minutes
Directed by: Chan-wook Park
Starring: Yeong-ae Lee
IMDB rating: 7.7
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0451094/
In imagination, revenge always seems satisfying. You've been wronged, but you're able to make things right, punish evil and make up for the event(s) of the past. But reality isn't often like that. Setting your mind on hurting someone is a tough ask for most people, particularly when your main emotion is despair rather than anger. At the end of it all, you're still the same person, and you feel the same way because you haven't changed the past, and whatever was taken from you is still gone or whatever was done to you has not been erased from time.
And so we come to the third installment of the Vengeance Trilogy. If you've been taking notes, you'll recall that these films are unrelated in that they do not feature any of the same characters, settings or plots, other than the fact that they are all primarily concerned with vengeance and are the work of the same writer-director.
After spending 13 years in prison for kidnapping and murdering a young boy, Geum-ja is released, and has two things in mind: becoming re-aquainted with the young daughter that she was forced to leave behind, and finding the man who commited the crime for which she was imprisoned.
Sympathy For Mr Vengeance and Oldboy were both excellent, so I was eager to see this film soon after. I think perhaps those expectations made this viewing a bit of an anti-climax, as SFLV, though a very good film, is not quite as impressive as the other two.
Despite this, it's still definitley worth a watch, and serves as a fitting end to the trilogy, looking at things in a different and perhaps more realistic way.
7/10