Lady Vengeance and X-3

This was a two-movie weekend! Friday night, I couldn’t get tickets for X-Men 3, so instead bugsybanana and I saw Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, a South Korean revenge flick I first heard about through Enrico Casarosa’s blog.

Lady Vengeance sounds like a chop-socky wire-fu flick, but it’s not. It’s about a woman who had to take the fall for a crime she didn’t commit, and spent her years in prison working out a revenge plan, and then discovers that she’s guiltier than she’d thought, and her vengeance gets complicated. The climax is brutal and remorseless — no redemption here, just accounts being balanced — and moreso for being set in an abandoned schoolhouse, with the participants acting almost like schoolkids working on a project. (Do South Korean students handle cleanup in their schools like the Japanese do?) Directed by Chan-wook Park, and now I may have to track down Oldboy.

X-Men 3, well, it was nice to see all the splashy fight scenes and fanboyish shouts-out (Hank McCoy! Moira McTaggart! Jamie Madrox! Juggernaut! The danger room!), and this movie handles better than any other big-name superhero property film the sense of taking place in a crowded superhero world, but really, much of the dialog was almost Claremont-level clunky, and the whole Dark Phoenix plotline (stand here for half the movie looking moody, then turn into the level boss at the end) could have been left out entirely, and that would have left time for adding some actual causal relationships between the set pieces. Yeah yeah, sit through the credits for the surprising revelation that you might actually care about if you’re writing post-third-movie fanfic.