A kinder, gentler Park|No animals were harmed in the making of “Lady Vengeance.”
This may come as a disappointment to devotees of Park Chanwook, the controversial Korean director of “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and “Oldboy.” Relatively restrained, at least by the hysterical standard of its predecessors, the concluding chapter of Park’s “vengeance trilogy” is a kinder, gentler exercise in empty virtuosity. And it raises a critical new question about this much-discussed filmmaker: Which has grown more tiresome, the debate surrounding his intentions or the movies he makes?
The issue of whether Park is a serious artist or a solipsistic showoff ought to have been settled by “Cut,” his tacky, pretentious, monstrously tedious contribution to the omnibus film “Three Extremes.” But the line still stretches back to “Oldboy,” his prize-winning exercise in steroidal pulp fiction.
As you’ll recall if you saw it – and who could forget? – one of the first things the hero of that film did after escaping from years of imprisonment was to stop by a sushi joint and sink his teeth into a live, exceedingly distressed octopus. Repellent from an animal-rights perspective but as compelling an image as you’ll find in recent movies, the Octopus Scene remains the quintessential Park provocation.
Nothing in the new movie pushes buttons that hard or collapses so many ideas, both daring and dubious, into a single savage image. Always full of hot air, Park appears to have run out of steam.
His fatigue can be seen in the lazy repetition that gives us another victim of wrongful imprisonment, Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae), newly released and crazed on revenge. In confessing to the murder of a young boy, she took the fall for the real killer, a schoolteacher played by Choi Min-sik of “Oldboy.”
In one of a hundred arbitrary plot details, he forced Geum-ja’s hand by kidnapping her daughter. On finishing her prison term, she reclaims the child, who was adopted by a goofy Australian family, and sets to conspiring a nasty death for her nemesis.
Along the way, under the moronic pretext of testing a gun, she blows the head off a puppy. Relax; it happens off screen. But there is plenty of visible atrocity. Men are tortured, women are raped and children in snuff videos scream in terror as their anguished parents are forced to watch.
This last bit of business kicks off a Grand Guignol finale that might have expressed an idea instead of an attitude had it any traction in the real world or exhibited the internal logic of a delirious contrivance like Brian De Palma’s “Femme Fatale.” This is the gist of Park’s irrelevance as anything but a stylist, and a facile one at that. His puppet people and phony plots are an excuse for rhetorical showboating, neither a source of human value nor the medium of legitimate ethical inquiry.
That’s why the story of “Lady Vengeance” is such a convoluted hodgepodge of time frames, subplots and bit-player back stories. That’s why Geum-ja’s ordeal elicits no sympathy. That’s why the ending is trite, not transgressive. And that’s why Park’s much-lauded formal chops – skewed perspectives, elegant symmetries, swaggering camera work and digitally enhanced edits – just don’t cut it.