Just a bridge between two masterpieces

Rating: 7/10 (12 April 2013)

Differently from previous "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance", Park Chan-wook's iper-realistic and brutal aesthetics here becomes dynamic and puzzled, as its violence gets more spectacular than estranged, so more involved in entertainment than in reflection: in this sense it's an achieved film for the way it manipulates, even with a great dodge, the attention of the audience who never gives up in the suspense crescendo, plot twists, flashbacks, all mixed by sapient editing just to get us curious and intrigued. Anyway the extreme violence becomes pathetic, really excessive if not justified, self-satisfied in sadistic incursions in bad taste and in a mannerism end to itself, surely of great impact for the ability of director to shock and wonder, but not always necessary. After all the narrative machine, cerebral, confused, studied like a glove with that modern and Hollywood-a-like attitude to plot twist and ambiguity, doesn't betray the comics' source with frame shots and parallel chronological structure, but even with a certain, overblown absurdity which often cuts off of the film, visually sensational, a kind of honesty. Chased by apocalyptic music, macabre game of incest and blackmails, punishments and tortures, violence against himself, against next in line, against animals (the protagonist eat a living octopus), has some inventive flash, it's cathartic as Greek tragedy source (Sophocles' "Oedipus the King"), but even if the passionate audience sews the wires of the story and characters, gets order in the chaos and fins solutions to the enigma, something is still missing, something unachieved and unobserved: an authentic verisimilitude for this delirium, which goes over the equilibrium between Dionysian and Apollonian , giving up to this last one and to a muddled work of mind. By the way, it's a great actor performance for Choi-Min Sik, in a still significant artwork from a certain Asiatic cinema, and from an extraordinary director. In his trilogy, this film in the middle is the less deep and the funniest one, the one in which he dared the most in terms of style and provocation, but even the most commercial and mainstream, in Tarantino pulp era.