Yeah, it was kind of inevitable. With the release of the Oldboy remake coming ever closer and the announcement of a remake of Lady Vengeance, it was only a matter of time before the first film in Park Chan-Wook’s incredible Vengeance Trilogy was remade for American audiences. Still, I hoped it wouldn’t happen. Of the three films, Mr. Vengeance is the least foreigner-friendly, and I can’t see American audiences reacting well to its extremely bleak narrative (much moreso than either Oldboy or Lady Vengeance, both of which end on somewhat hopeful notes). Despite all that, the unfortunate has happened, and remake rights have been picked up.
Behind the project are Silver Reel and Lotus Entertainment, backed by, bizarrely enough, Lorenzo di Bonaventura Mark Vahradian, producers of the Transformers films. Along with that pair, Broken City writer Brian Tucker has penned a script that, according to Deadline, “centers on two men who are bound by their common sense of loss and headed on a collision course of revenge.” It’s a vague description to be sure, but words like “bound” and “collision course” imply generic and dumb, and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is neither of those things. The original is a complex and disturbing film, and my opinion of the best Vengeance film oscillates frequently between it and Oldboy.
In other words, it shouldn’t be marred by American hands. Certainly not the ones that produced Transformers. That’s just horrible. Remakes of the latter two films in the Trilogy are bad enough. A terrible trifecta will only make life worse for everybody.
[Via Twitch, Deadline]
