Lady Vengeance (***1/2)

The third of Park Chan-Wook’s “vengeance trilogy,” reminiscent in tone of Kill Bill: Vol. II, represents an excellent chance for American action fans to see the work of one of Asia’s leading directors.

Movies like this tend to fall between the cracks when it comes to getting released here. The multiplexes bypass them because they’re not in English, and the art houses tend to favor drama. So even though Asian action movies are often celebrated by video buffs, they don’t often get released here theatrically. (The mythical martial-arts subgenre currently represented by The Promise represents a recent exception, the historical settings perhaps rendering them sufficiently high-brow for import.) This is all by way of saying, if you like action films, check this out. It’s actually the last part of what’s been dubbed Park Chan-Wook’s “vengeance trilogy,” but the films are linked primarily by theme, not plot. (The second and most celebrated part of the trilogy, Oldboy, currently ranked #116 on IMDB.com’s list of top films, had a meager run in 2005 in a few American cities, but only played here at the Philadelphia Film Festival.)

Star Lee Young-Ae’s character has been convicted of kidnapping and murder of a child. Beginning with her surreally filmed release from prison, we follow her forward as she seeks revenge on her former mentor (Oldboy star Choi Min-Sik), who’s set her up, and backward as we see the events surrounding her imprisonment. The prison scenes present a motley assortment of women who (mostly) become her allies on the outside. The best American analog to this film is probably Quentin Tarentino’s Kill Bill: Vol. II. (Not coincidentally, Tarentino is a huge fan of Park.) Its mix of toughness, tenderness, and off-kilter humor is rare in American cinema. Granted, in the same way as Kill Bill, it’s probably too strange to be a tearjerker, but there’s an emotional core to the film absent from most action films, and it’s certainly not predictable. This movie should be opening in 2000 theaters, but it’s a happy circumstance that Americans will get to see it at all.

IMDb link