Oldboy: Film Review
Photo Credit: FilmDistrict
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Talk about a rough time at the movies. Yikes.
The weird (and I really mean weird) thing about Oldboy is that it feels like a movie Quentin Tarantino tried to make, got bored halfway thru, and dumped on Spike Lee’s doorstep to finish. It’s an imbalanced mesh of their two trademark styles. It wants to be intellectual and earnest, and it also wants to be absurdly violent and over-the-top. In the end, methinks it’s Tarantino who wins.
The story, for those who haven’t seen the 2003 Korean original it’s based upon, is about a man named Joe Doucett (Josh Brolin) who gets trapped inside a hotel room for 20 years with no reason as to why or who he has been essentially erased from existence. He has to watch his life unfold on the news (i.e. his wife is raped and murdered, and the only suspect is Joe). One day, equally unexplained, he is released. His first – and only – order of business is to find out who is behind his imprisonment. He meets Marie (Elizabeth Olsen), a social worker who tries to help him and with whom he ends up falling in love, and also a stranger played by Sharlto Copley who is such a cardboard cutout of a villain that you should go right now and look up “villain” in your dictionary and find his picture.
Things go from gory and bloody to downright gruesomely unwatchable. More than a couple people in the screening I attended walked out after the first half. This will be one of those I-hated-it-or-I-loved-it-you-just-don’t-get-it movies a la Fight Club or Zero Dark Thirty. Watchable, and then unwatchable, all at the same time.
