Retro Review: Oldboy

Writer's Note: In honor of writer/director Spike Lee's birthday, I decided to do the right thing and republish my take on his remake of Oldboy, the much-beloved South Korean flick of the same name from 2003. How did it stack up? Read on to find out!

(For the record, Lee was reportedly not happy with the re-edit done by his producers, which shaved off some thirty minutes from his original two hour-and-twenty-minute cut, but it's not that bad- in fact, he's done much worse, IMHO. She Hate Me, anyone?)


The following review was originally published in UAB's Kaleidoscope on December 7th, 2013.

And the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo memorial award for the Most Feel-Bad Movie of the holiday season goes to… Oldboy! 

As should come to no surprise to anyone who’s seen the completely bent original Korean flick of the same name, this is one messed-up movie. 

Those worried that director Spike Lee, working WAY outside of his comfort zone, would shy away from some of the more outré material in justly-celebrated auteur Park Chan-Wook’s insane film and/or the manga upon which it is based needn’t have, because this is far and away the craziest thing you’ll likely to see this December, if indeed anyone sees it at all. 

That said, it’s undeniably Lee’s best non-documentary work in ages, at least since the underrated Inside Man, back in 2006, but possibly since 2002’s superlative The 25th Hour, which in certain ways it reminded me of. Oldboy shares the same gritty tone and look of that latter film, as well as a nicely-compressed framing, which is key for a film that spans over twenty years. 

It’s certainly never boring, that's for sure, and even if you’ve seen the original, it’s fascinating trying to figure out where Lee is going with all of this, and how it will differ from what goes down in the original.

The set-up is deceptively simple: a drunken sleazeball of a man, ad exec Joe Doucett (Josh Brolin) is out on a bender after blowing a key deal with his company when he stupidly hits on the wife of the guy (Lance Reddick, of Fringe and Lost fame) he’s trying to woo for his business. 

After passing out/being knocked out shortly after seeing an Asian woman with a yellow umbrella, he wakes up in what appears to be a hotel room, but is actually a prison in disguise. There, he spends the next twenty years, with no idea why he’s there in the first place.  

It’s a grabber of a premise, and just as Doucett becomes obsessed with finding out why he’s there and who put him there in the first place, so do we become fascinated with the same. Doucett assembles a list of potential culprits, as well as biding his time writing letters to his daughter, trying to explain what happened, especially after he sees a report on a news program that alleges that he killed his ex-wife, leaving her without any family to speak of and a murderer for a father. (While unconscious, whoever put him there takes various hair samples and the like to frame him for the murder.)   

Eventually, he kicks the booze his captor provides for him every day, gets into shape with the aid of an exercise show, and even learns martial arts from the movies he watches on the television provided for him, his only outlet into the world outside. 

Twenty years later, he is inexplicably released, and discovers that the culprit has also kidnapped his daughter and given Doucett a limited amount of time to rescue her, or he/she/they will kill her. All he has to do is figure out who is behind all this and why. Needless to say, this is easier said than done. 

Helping him is old pal Chucky (Lee regular and former Sopranos cast member Michael Imperioli) and a nurse, Marie (Elizabeth Olsen), who acquaint Doucett with the wonderful new world of laptops, cell phones, and so forth. 

Amongst the bad guys Doucett tangles with are “The Stranger” (Sharlto Copley, of Elysium and District 9 fame) and Chaney (another Lee regular, Samuel L. Jackson), who runs the place Doucett was held captive in. If you can believe it, things get even weirder. 

This is edgy, exciting stuff, and if it's not even remotely appropriate for the holiday season, hey, at least it’s not boring. Besides, not everyone wants to see the latest animated Disney flick or Medea Christmas movie. 

I don’t know what it’s chances are for box office success, but for what it’s worth, it’s one of Lee’s most engaging movies to date, with a knockout cast and some superlative cinematography by Sean Bobbitt that perfectly and hypnotically sucks the viewer into Doucett’s personal hell and almost immediately into the story at hand. 

Brolin wholly inhabits his character to the extent that you never have any trouble buying into it- nor have any problem buying that he’s undoubtedly ticked off more than a few people over the years. Olsen makes a fine, sexy foil as a fellow lost soul, herself a recovering addict still trying to keep her head above water. And who doesn’t like to see Jackson in full-on crazy mode?  

There’s some fantastic sequences lifted straight from the original film, including a bravura martial arts fest in which Doucett takes on a small army of foes in the building in which he was imprisoned for all those years. The violence is abrupt and gruesome, showing that, for all his complaints about fellow director Quentin Tarantino, Lee’s learned a thing or two from watching his stuff. It’s also got a steamy sex scene from the two leads, for all you Brolin and Olsen fans- trust me, you get quite the eyeful of both over the course of this movie. 

So, all in all, this is everything you could ask for in a remake of the original, save perhaps the notorious octopus scene, which Lee slyly nods to in the locale in which it occurs in the original. But that’s a small complaint. 

Everything else is present and accounted for, and though the script by Mark Protosevich wisely tweaks the material so that it won’t be a complete retread of the original (and thus, still pack a punch for those who have already seen it), it retains everything memorable about the source material at hand.  

It may not exactly scream Christmas time viewing, but for those looking for a left-of-center alternative to the holiday blitz, this should do the trick nicely. Longtime Lee fans might not know quite what to make of it, but this fan gives it a strong B+. You might lose your dumplings when it gets to the big twist at the end, but it’s nothing if not original!