Personally, having enjoyed I Saw The Devil, I wouldn't even compare it to the vengeance trilogy. I thought I Saw The Devil had its focus on violence rather than creating a protagonist that we really connected to. I'm not saying the protagonist was necessarily bad, just could gave been better. Overall, enjoyable film.

What I really enjoyed about Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance was that we followed a deaf factory-worker (Ryu), and the movie had no score. No music. There's minimal dialogue in the first half of the film, so much of the story is told visually. Not only that, through the movie, our sympathy gets redirected from one character to another. This makes us question the morality of these situations, while we watch as the story takes us down a path where things go from bad to worse.