I’m a huge fan of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy, the first two entries in Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy, and as such I went into 2005's Lady Vengeance, the third and final film in the series, thinking it might fall short of the others.
Well, I was wrong; Lady Vengeance is every bit as amazing as its predecessors, and ranks right up there with They Call Her One Eye, Lady Snowblood, and the Kill Bill series as one of the greatest women revenge films ever made.
When she was 19 years old, Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae) was sentenced to 14 years in prison for kidnapping and murdering a 5-year-old boy. But as it turns out, Lee Geum-ja took the fall for someone else, school teacher Mr. Baek (Choi Min-sik), who gets a kick out of abusing children.
Upon her release, Lee Geum-ja sets out to take bloody revenge against the man who ruined her life, and she spent her entire prison sentence planning out exactly how she was going to do it. But a grisly discovery, as well as a reconciliation with her long-lost daughter (Kwon Yea-young), forces Lee Geum-ja to settle on an alternative means of vengeance.
And oh baby, is it strong!
Like Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy before it, Lady Vengeance is jam-packed with style and loads of violence, and director Park Chan-wook keeps things moving at a brisk pace. It’s the revenge scenes at the conclusion of the film, however, that pushed this one over the top for me. As difficult as they were to watch, they were also very, very satisfying.
In fact, Lady Vengeance might feature the greatest revenge sequence ever committed to film, and like its predecessors is a masterpiece that needs to be seen.
Rating: 9.5 out of 10 (What are you waiting for?!?)
1 comment:
The bit with the baby scissor is what sticks in my mind.
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