Oldboy

At The Cinemas

When a movie is as absurd plot and character-wise as Oldboy is, it must rely heavily on originality and style to drive its success. These dynamics, highlighted by Park Chan-wook's choreographed brutality and maximalism, are what elevated the Korean original to the level of cult classic. If one were to critique the original, one may accuse it of being over-stylized and too violent. With Spike Lee's unimaginative sequel, one would flip this accusation over on itself, because while this Oldboy does retain some of the original's queasy violence, it is utterly devoid of style.

The story here, which is a revenge tale that involves a man being locked in a room for twenty years, lends itself to a movie that should divulge itself in style over substance. While his prior work would seem to suggest that Spike Lee would be the right man for such a picture, his effort here is mind-numbingly drab. It's an exercise in style over substance without any daring style. The result is a movie difficult to sit through, despite the fact that it boasts a very strong supporting performance from up-and-comer Elizabeth Olsen.

If the original film is a tipsy 16-year old in a Ferrari: exciting and fast, but careless and reckless, the sequel is an 80 year old in a Ford Pinto with bad reaction time and worse vision. Even when all of the lights are green, Lee is tapping on the brakes. You don't take this story and simply go through the motions, you go balls to the walls, so that when the plot is at its most insane, which, in the original, was its final act, the movie should be at its ludicrous best. The original was conscious of, and embraced, its own absurdity. Lee's version seems hesitant to do anything whatsoever: when the film should rev its engine, it simply sits idly, and checks, and re-checks its rearview mirror. The audience is in the passenger seat, groaning, and praying that he will just hurry it up and get through the light.

It would not be a stretch to suggest that Lee has created the anti-Oldboy: a movie that's sluggish, monotonous, and worst of all, timid. It should be noted that Lee's director's cut is allegedly around three hours, while the studio-contaminated film we got in theaters was only 104 minutes. Regardless, the movie that ran in theaters was empty, quite literally like the theaters that screened it, as it promptly bombed out of cinemas. It is a film empty of both aesthetic creativity and emotional punch, despite the fact that it calls for both, amid a plot laden with contrivances. Josh Brolin's performance in the lead is fine, as is Sharlto Copley's devilish and conniving Snidely Whiplash of a villain.  Performances aside, I must digress into sports analogy, as the Oldboy remake holds more than one similarity with Spike Lee's beloved New York Knicks of this season. It is a substandard product with a slow-moving, corpse-like core, who, with the pedigrees of players like Carmelo Anthony and Tyson Chandler, or, in the film's case, Lee and Brolin, more was expected from by the fans. Like his Knickerbockers, Lee has sputtered with his latest joint. Hopefully he gets his swagger back (I'm not so sure about the Knicks, though).