Korean director Park Chan-wook had a big commercial hit with his film, “Joint Security Area.” His studio gave him a much bigger budget and he came up with “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” a handsome, thoroughly discomforting revenge thriller that offers none of the usual satisfactions of the genre-Tony Scott’s “Man on Fire,” with Denzel Washington is the gold standard-and all of the drawbacks.

It is a long movie, and it moves very slowly. The violence provides no relief or release, since it unfolds at a deliberate pace as well. The story goes as follows:

A deaf mute named Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun), whose sister (Lim Ji-Eun) sacrificed everything to put him into art school, is trying to help her get a kidney transplant. Because his blood type is incompatible and no donors are available, he turns to a group of black-market organ dealers who offer to find one in return for one of his and ten million won. The dealers rip him off, so Ryu conspires with his girlfriend, Yeong-mi (Bae Du-na), a political activist, to kidnap his former boss’s young daughter and ransom her for the ten million won.

Alas, they get the money, but Ryu’s sister dies before they can get her kidney. Then the kidnapped little girl accidentally drowns, and things begin to spiral out of control as the girl’s father (Song Kang-ho) decides to take matters into his own hands with the help of a sympathetic cop.

What follows unfolds like the ear-cutting scene of “Reservoir Dogs” played as a slow motion tape loop. Ryu being deaf and unexpressive, his girlfriend being the most irritating kind of political activist, the kidnapped girl’s father being opaque and one-dimensional-an abstraction of the principle of revenge-and everyone else being brutal and corrupt, the movie hasn’t got a lot of human interest.

There are some stunningly beautiful frames, however, and some intriguing plot twists. None of it is the sort of thing I would recommend to somebody I cared about. For all its occasional beauty, “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” is a downer without much in the way of a moral point. Rated R.

COURTESY PHOTO