Mediocre Movie Club Movie Reviews

Oldboy

3/23/2016

A-
3.79

A boorish man is kidnapped and help prisoner for 15 years, only to be suddenly released with no explanation. He seeks brutal revenge on his captors, whoever they may be.

Directed by Park Chan-wook
Starring Choi Min-sik, Yoo Ji-tae, and Kang Hye-Juung
Initial review by JR Peters

I decided on this movie because I watched the american version and absolutely hated it. I needed to cleanse my mind of any bad connotations with the word “Oldboy”. This movie has an 80 on Rotten Tomatoes so I assumed it was at least going to be decent. It definitely lived up to the score. I won’t be writing much because I feel like anything I say might ruin the movie for you.

The first 5 minutes of the movie is establishing the kind of man he was before anything happened and really only serves that purpose. The best part of the movie, in my humble opinion, is when Dae-su Oh is taken prisoner for some unknown reason. During his time as prisoner Dae-su Oh is shown to get crazier, his demeanor completely changes, and time seems to go slower. The writing, directing, and editing, and acting came together almost perfectly to pull this off. His speech changes and becomes more abrasive, as time goes by the actions performed are increasingly slowed and his list words while locked up are repeated probably 10 times. There are other things that make this great, but you’ll need to watch it to see it for yourself. This 20 minutes deserves an A/A+ and the rest of the movie doesn’t do much worse.

The rest of the movie does not disappoint at all. Dae-su Oh appears to be completely insatiable in his quest for vengeance even at points willing to throw away his relationship with his new found love Mi-do. The relationship between Dae-su Oh and Mi-do is shown to burn with the white-hot intensity of one thousand burning suns. This would make sense considering he’s been locked up and she’s probably 25 and having her first love. The actors portrayed this well. Showing the need for vengeance pulling him one way and the need for love pulling him in the opposite.

The climax is absolutely insane. It puts almost all climaxes I can remember to shame. The only problem I have with the movie is the there are 2 scenes that I found to be needless.

The Good:
Real Fights with basically no CGI
Good Acting
Good Directing
Good Editing
Good Writing

The Bad:
Unneeded scene(s)

I’m giving this an A-.

16 Comments

Admin

3/23/2016 09:56:09 pm

Reserved for comments on initial review.

Jon

3/27/2016 10:23:44 pm

A masochistic part of me wants to see the remake. Talk me out of it. I'm very interested in why one is a modern masterpiece and the other got maybe the worst reviews of Spike Lee's career.

John Robert Peters, Jr.

4/24/2016 01:10:55 pm

The first thing the Oldboy(2013) does wrong it giving us too much time with him before he gets taken and the entire time he's a dick vs Oldboy(2003) where you just see him drunk and then taken. So in the remake you have a person that you already hate being taken vs a person that was just drunk being taken. It makes it hard the rest of the movie to connect/feel bad for what is happening to him. Which is bad because in my opinion for a revenge movie to be truly good you must at least have some sympathy or empathy for the person that is trying to get the revenge.

When he is in the room by himself they try entirely to hard to make him seem like he is going crazy. He becomes best friends with a mouse, he bites his hand and uses the blood to make a face on a pillow and sleeps with it and there's too much focus around using historical events that we all know happened to show time passing. Instead of just using context and there was too much TV in as well.

There's also the relationship between Marie and him. Is completely fake and disingenuous instead of being believable and there's no chemistry between the two of them IMHO.

Throughout the remake there are times you are supposed to find humorous that fell completely flat and really kinda messed up the tone of the movie and then the dialogue falls completely flat for me as well.

You also have to remember that Spike Lee only directed this so he could only do so much with what he was given, but he definitely gets a lot of blame and he probably shouldn't have agreed to direct this film.

Also after I watched the original version it made me hate the remake even more. There were things I thought were ok in the remake that after watching the original make me dislike it even more. Like the big reveal, the reason for him locking the girl up, the amount of screen time the dude the locks him up gets, the insane demeanor change when you find out its his daughter. Things like that and basically the last 15 minutes of the movie is much better in the original than it is in the remake.

4/26/2016 03:50:50 am

You've convinced me to just watch the original Oldboy again if the urge ever arises to watch Lee's version.

3/27/2016 10:24:38 pm

Which scenes fell flat for you?

4/24/2016 03:11:07 pm

Sorry for the really late response, but I can't really think of the other right now but Mi-Do and the subway ant scene was absolutely wast of time. I believe it was meant to show that they both hallucinate in the same way which is a nod to them being related. If that's not it, then I don't really know what the point was.

Shane

3/25/2016 03:40:05 pm

This movie is batshit crazy and amazing despite some weird plot choices. Overall, I'm willing to make some leaps of faith on it. It deserves more more words, but I don't currently have the time.

A very strong B+.

Lane

3/26/2016 06:56:19 pm

For me, “Oldboy” falls into the league of films that leaves me saying, “what the heck just happened here?” In a good way. It deconstructs the revenge tale beautifully and had me off balance the entire time.

Asian films often leave me feeling like there’s a joke I’m not getting, which most of the time is my fault, but I realized a little over halfway into “Oldboy” that this is part of the strategy here. Deep down, the film is a reflection on what causes someone to truly become unhinged. As it turns out, it’s not much.

The brilliance of this revenge tale is that the revenge is taken for something seemingly small—an offhand comment that turns into a rumor that eventually leads to a suicide. Everyone can relate to being complicit in the perpetuation of a harmful rumor. For most of us, the result was probably hurt feelings or broken trust, and when we look back we mostly think of how silly and petty all the high school drama was. “Oldboy” takes that premise to an insidious end. “Be it a rock or a grain of sand, in water they sink as the same.” A rumor—the smallest of sins, one might argue—sinks the same as a murder. Or, at least that’s what’s going through Woo-jin’s mind.

The revenge, it turns out, isn’t found in inflicting violence (though there’s plenty of that to go around); its when Woo-jin masterfully makes Oh Dae-su feel the same broken heartedness that he felt for his illicit affair with his sister. The revenge is transference and it more devastating than physical violence could ever be. By it’s end, “Oldboy” has hit “Se7en” territory with its psychological twists and turns.

There’s a lot more to say about this film, but I’m pretty impressed. Now, I’m going to go read internet interpretations for hours.

Grade: A

3/28/2016 03:56:15 pm

Even the smallest slights can be something for people to cling to. It's something we can point to that wronged us. It's a starting point and easy thing to blame for misfortune.

In our last Deadwood pod, Bryan mentioned that humans at great at recognizing when something is wrong. I agree. What we're not great at as individuals, however, is assigning proper blame or finding out how or why something happens or works. (Thank you for the scientific method, Flying Spaghetti Monster.)

Revenge is based on a post-facto pinning of suffering in the wrong direction. While grief, pain and sadness can be started by another person's actions, when we choose the path of revenge to right a wrong, we choose to wallow in that pain. We carry forward and outward rather than confronting it and looking inward. It's always a brutal miscalculation of why a person suffers. It's also a miscalculation of whether or not bad things are supposed to happen to a person. It's a stroke of our ego that we're too good to have a friend die in a car accident, be bullied into committing suicide or dying of a rare disease. We want to find something to blame it on rather than accepting it. It's our own narcissism that leads us to revenge.

3/29/2016 03:47:45 am

This is what I want from a revenge film. The last one we did, Blue Ruin, had many comments expended on it and its more workmanlike, procedural approach to vengeance. That was fine, but it lacked the grandiosity that a person who's all-time favorite film is Kill Bill wants from movies about a wronged party trying to balance the scales. Not to relitigate that discussion, but to frame this review, the pursuit of vengeance outside of the law is such an outlandish proposition, that the cinematic rule is 'the bigger, the better.' It doesn't get much bigger than Oldboy.

Lane and Shane already alluded to it, but in a film that features self-mutilation, long-term imprisonment, and incest, the most disconcerting aspect of it might be the idea that an off-handed comment could ruin someone's life. To paraphrase Avon Barksdale in The Wire, how is a person never going to be a dick, never be cruel? Oh Dae-su fills notebook pages with people who might be behind his imprisonment, but he leaves Lee Woo-jin off his list because it never even occurred to him. Their teenage selves never exchanged a word, but one left their encounter and continued with his life, while the other had his irrevocably altered. Things get crazy in Oldboy, but they start in a banal way.

The above is the only relatable aspect of Oldboy, and even this sequence revolves around a brother and sister going the full-Lannister. Oldboy is a such a success because for many of the taboo and extreme places it goes, it is still evocative enough to convey some level of recognition. I'm never going to fight people with a hammer, but Choi Min-sik certainly convey how exhausting it would be. My tongue is probably going to stay in my mouth, but I can imagine the sounds I might make if I cut it out. Oh Dae-su's huge breakdown after the big revelation is so raw and devoid of pride, that the shame and desperation of the moment infects the viewer, too. Conversely, the deep apathy in his eyes while testing dumplings matches Lee Woo-jin's lack of emotion when he's doing his gymnastic exercises, two linked people almost dead to the world. Park Chan-wook gets the communication of sense memory, even in the communication of things left hopefully unexperienced.

All that's left for the protagonist and antagonist is their revenge, to the detriment of everyone who crosses their path. The in media res opening scene, when revisited, is a real opportunity for Oh Dae-su to have made a friend and ally, someone he prevented from committing suicide. Instead, he walks away single-mindedly when the man starts to unburden himself, not even turning around when his body falls to earth. This guy was terrible before he was imprisoned, and he hasn't taken the intervening years, which have, perhaps not incidentally, been great for South Korea in his absence, as an opportunity for self-reflection. Lee Woo-jin is just as callous. He manipulates Mi-do, kills his own right-hand man, and stabs No Joo-hwan in a fit of rage. Both men could walk away if they wanted to, but both push forward, their focus narrowed down to a finer and finer point until one is left tongue-less and broken and the other's brains are splattered on an elevator wall.

I usually write more about films that I love, but so much of Oldboy is visual. It's such a visceral experience that I don't feel that verbose about it. This is a great piece of action-filmmaking, a pitch-black tale of revenge, and a showcase for a true auteur. A-

3/29/2016 09:20:20 am

I think you nailed when saying it's hard to write about because it is so visceral. It's a wrenching experience that left me exhausted.

Sean

3/29/2016 11:57:50 am

Daaaaaaaaaamn!

That is a revenge movie.

Loses points for multiple times promoting the don't take no for an answer style of courting women.

Gains huge points for the crazy ass twist and Oh Dae Su's flip flopping from enraged and threatening to begging before ultimately cutting out his tongue.

Sometimes a movie goes out of its way to tie a bow on everything and it doesn't work, sometimes it explains nothing and pisses you off. This movie needed the bow, got the bow, and pulled it off with the hypnosis explanation. And nailed the ultimate question- not why was he locked up, not can 10 years of imaginary training pay off, but Why was Oh Dae Su released? The revenge wasnt the imprisonment but the release- how does it feel to move into a larger prison.

Agree with above on a couple unnecessary scenes- Mi-Do's Subway ant stands out.

A

Mindy

3/30/2016 01:34:20 pm

Mindy said it was dumb and gave it a C. My thought is subtitle movies are difficult to watch when you are only 20% paying attention. Although she liked Blue is the Warmest Color. Does that mean something?

Drew

4/23/2016 11:09:22 am

This was difficult for me. I needed some help digesting it. What I got from it was revenge comes in different ways and seeing it portrayed was phenomenal.

The beginning had me hooked. It was like he suddenly snapped out of whatever coma he endured and realized what he was doing. A mesmerizing and fantastic start to a tough and wild film.

The ongoing process to find out what happened to him and this girl kept the viewer on edge. It was such a crazy ride that knowing what would happen next was next to impossible to predict.

The final two scenes said it all. It left me with a "wtf" feeling. It was revealed that everything was planned from the beginning. All the trails, tribulations, and joy the man and the young lady faced were all part of a bigger scheme and that was revenge. Once the disclosure of sibling incest became known and the apparent suicide was an actual murder, the one who was blamed would be tortured. Tortured so much that he and the young girl commit parent - child incest and it is thrown in his face like a fireball. His reaction to save his daughter from this knowledge was the exact kind of dedication any parent would show to a child to keep away from danger. The ultimate sacrifice was the cutting of his tongue. Having that done and the girl still alive, there is nothing left for the puppet master to do and now he must live up to his part of the deal and that is to end his own life.

Old Boy was a revenge story that did not go as a revenge story would. Does not the protagonist deliver the final blow to the antagonist? He should but Old Boy came throw in a different yet creative way. The protagonist won but not through his own actions but through the antagonist's self disqualification. Due to that, Old Boy received high marks. Non predictable endings are, indeed, the worst but Park Chan - wook came through in a twisted but refreshing manner.

Grade: A

Tom

5/1/2016 01:52:05 am

A modern retelling of oedipus rex. Hubris in all its destructive glory writ large. In this interpritation however we have more to ponder. The greeks were only interested in the catharsis in the singular this film explored a duality of hubris, its intertwining destructive nature, and it's inevitable ruination of the men involved. It was a glorious bloody, intriguing, at times completely nonsensical, and humorous tale of incest, pride, revenge, and love. fucking amazing. An oracle told oedipus he would bed his mother and kill his father. He was then told numerous times to stop his quest for his true parents but his hubris was his need for knowledge and believing he was above the gods' oracle. It is this which brings to fruition the prophecy of the oracle. In Oldboy the gods are replaced by a near omnipotent antagonist with his own hubris for revenge which leads to his own suicide. That leaves us with our hapless Oedipus who does not know why he is being persecuted, and then is so fueled by rage that he dances to the proxy god's tune to his own ruination. I found the duality of the weakness, and fall of twin chiral leads unique and engrossing.

A will likely watch again although the cleaning up (brain washing) of Oh Dae Su's story at the end to make the love palatable was sloppy, and not needed.

Bryan

6/12/2016 10:56:51 pm

This shit was messed up. A modern Shakespeare of sorts. The filming of the fight scene in the hallway was incredibly well done - great use of panorama. I started writing out all the cringeworthy scenes both physical and mental, but it became distracting.

If you can handle the cringe, I'd say A- . But staying away is wise for the squeamish.

Oldboy

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