Hollywood's fever for foreign-language remakes shows no signs of abating. Warner Bros. is the latest studio to join the jamboree, picking up the rights to The Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, one third of Park Chan-wook's acclaimed vengeance trilogy.
According to Variety, Brian Tucker (Broken City) has been tasked with scripting the remake. Presumably he's been given a brief to tone down the bloodshed slightly. It's not giving too much away to say that the original, 128 minutes of liberally splashed rhesus positive, probably wouldn't have mainstream appeal Stateside as a shot-for-shot remake.
More's the pity because the South Korean auteur's thriller is a cracker, in which a salaryman, defrauded of the money he needs to pay for his sister's kidney transplant, sets about killing all those responsible (and a few of those who aren't). In the process, he finds himself the object of another man's quest for revenge.
Before getting too excited about this feast of eye-for-an-eye retribution reappearing on our screens in a different guise, however, it's worth bearing in mind the salutary lesson of Oldboy. Picked up by DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and Will Smith attached, it now seems to be languishing in the studio's 'too hard' basket.