It was only a matter of time before the new decade kicked off with some horrific news of Hollywood remaking a classic film. And so yesterday brought word that Warner Brothers have aquired the rights to Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, and plan to remake it for the English-speaking audience.

Sympathy was the first in Korean director Park Chan-Wook’s trilogy of films dealing with the notion of revenge. And while all of them subvert the satisfaction of traditional vengeance, Sympathy is possibly the most fascinating. It starts with a deaf labourer kidnapping the daughter of a wealthy businessman in order to fund his ailing sister’s operation. Naturally, things go wrong but interestingly the film’s perspective changes to that of the wealthy businessman and his search for the kidnappers. In doing this, the film bravely refuses to provide us with a traditional antagonist and instead suggests that vengeance only creates victims. It’s a daring film and ensured that Park Chan-Wook is one of the best directors in world-cinema.

Who knows what a Hollywood remake will do with the story. Will it inject unwanted antagonists? The original had a bunch of gangsters who double-cross the deaf labourer, and the remake could well indeed shift focus to them and ruin the original premise. It most certainly will be more heavy-handed, and a sickeningly melodramatic score will no doubt be involved. Of course, it’s hard to predict the direction the film will take without knowing the talent attached, and there’s no word of director or case. The writer is Brian Tucker, whose only credit is Broken City, an upcoming neo-noir detective story.

A while back it was announced that Steven Spielberg was due to direct the second of the vengeance trilogy movies: Oldboy, with Will Smith to star. The stylistically brilliant original, however, featured some disturbing moments of incest and torture, and thankfully the whole idea was dropped last year. Will Sympathy have the same fate? Well unless a truly visionary director is attached, let’s hope so.