With Hollywood currently in love with all things based around revenge, it’s perhaps not surprising someone has picked up the remake rights to Park Chan-Wook’s world cinema hit, Sympathy For Mr Vengeance. Screen Daily reports that Warner is the studio that’s set its sights on the film, with Brian Tucker (Broken City) signed up to write the script.
Although a lot of people will bristle at the thought of a remake, you can certainly see why Hollywood was attracted to it. The 2002 movie is about a deaf and dumb man (although I can’t imagine they’ll keep that aspect in the remake) who kidnaps a woman in order to try and get the money to pay for a black market kidney his sister needs. However a tragedy sets off a series of violent acts of revenge, with two men trying to get payback for the death of a loved one, with the problem being that each is responsible for the other person’s misery.
It seems its this aspect – of two men each trying to get revenge on the other – that Warner most likes about the film.
Sympathy was the first chapter in Park Chan-Wook’s now legendary Vengeance trilogy, which also includes Oldboy and Lady Vengeance. You may remember that Steven Spielberg and Will Smith were planning a remake of Oldboy, and while it doesn’t look like they’ll be involved anymore, it seems Mandate Pictures, which hold the US rights, is still looking to make an English language version of Oldboy at some point. Whether Hollywood can successfully translate the Korean director’s rather skewed take on the world is yet to be seen, although it’ll be interesting to see how they do it with both Sympathy and Oldboy.