Overall Rating
  Awesome: 42.47%
Worth A Look: 14.38%
Average: 10.27%
Pretty Bad: 4.11%
Total Crap: 28.77%
10 reviews, 86 user ratings
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| Oldboy |
by Robert Flaxman
"Hammers home the emotion, but little else."
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Oldboy is a film that can’t decide what it wants to be. Is it a serious emotional drama or a violent action romp? Is it funny or straight-faced? Is its main character a hero or an anti-hero? Is his nemesis the villain or merely an antagonist? In fact, all of these things are true at different times during the film. The sole constant through Oldboy is the emotional intensity of its characters, but this is undercut by the scattershot nature of the narrative and style.Kidnapped on a busy street and trapped in a room for 15 years with no explanation, Oh Dae-Su is suddenly released – with an equal lack of explanation – and then informed that his imprisonment was a riddle to which he must now find an answer. When Oh comes face to face with his captor, he nearly kills him – until he is reminded that if he gets his revenge quickly, he will never know why he was locked up.
Upon his release, Oh meets a young female chef named Mi-Do, whom he befriends in awkward fashion. The two seem to be drawn to each other by their mutual loneliness; the eventual love scene recalls the infamous scene in Monster’s Ball – there is nothing sexy here, just longing, pain, and awkward realism.
But Oldboy isn’t satisfied with its emotional drama side, and also sets Oh against various characters in a bizarre sort of underworld. In one scene that seems only to exist to be talked about later, Oh fights off around a dozen men in a narrow hallway armed with only a hammer, and the entire fight is seen in only one take. Oh appears to be taking out his anger and desire for revenge on the people who were partially responsible for his imprisonment (the men are employees of a strange captors-for-hire business), but the scene practically revels in its superfluousness and incongruity.
Still, the emotional aspect is intense enough to carry the film for most of its first half. At that point, Oh decides to stop being Rambo and start being Sherlock Holmes, and the film plods along in expository fashion until the ending, which is rather guessable. Oldboy’s concept is interesting, but it chose one where there was virtually no way there wasn’t going to be a big scene at the end where one character explains everything that happened. The scene in which this inevitably happens is just as didactic as one might expect.
Director Park Chan-Wook brings out the emotions again at the end of the film, but his characters’ motivations are… let’s say, to avoid spoiling anything, that they’re not exactly mainstream. Park deserves some credit for dealing with these emotions dispassionately, but it’s also a little weird and may well put off large portions of the audience. The final confrontation between Oh and his tormentor has its power, but it, too, devolves into an orgy of violence that seems to serve little wider purpose.
Oldboy is a movie whose main character has a right to be violent, and Park does a good job of establishing that. The violence itself isn’t always as justified. In one of the first scenes after his release, Oh comes upon a man about to jump off a building and convinces the man to stay alive long enough to hear Oh’s story. When he has finished, the man wants to tell him about his own story, but Oh walks away; as he exits the building, the man plummets to his death in the background. Oh may be warped from his 15 years of imprisonment, but this scene just feels needlessly sadistic and contributes nothing to Oh’s character that later scenes don’t do much better. The therapeutic value of pulling out one of his captors’ teeth with a hammer is at least understandable; grinning when an unrelated man kills himself is going a bit far.
At least enough of the violence has a purpose that the film doesn’t feel totally ridiculous, but the explicitness sometimes goes overboard. Just who is supposed to be getting punished here, Oh’s former captors or the audience? And what reaction is Park going for? Are we supposed to feel torn about rooting for Oh because of some of his actions, or are we supposed to cheer on his discount dentistry? That this is never made clear is interesting, but ultimately frustrating.Oldboy isn’t as smart as it thinks it is, and it isn’t as consistent as it should have been. It has plenty of scenes that work, though, mostly for their raw emotional power. Park may not have been able to decide exactly what kind of film he was making, but he nailed the strongest emotions nine times out of ten. In the end, the good outweighs the bad in Oldboy, making it a solid revenge drama that just hits a number of wrong notes.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=10328&reviewer=385
originally posted: 08/31/05 20:00:21
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Toronto Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Toronto Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Sundance Film Festival. For more in the 2005 Sundance Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 SXSW Film Festival. For more in the 2005 South By Southwest Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 San Francisco Asian-American Film Festival. For more in the 2005 San Francisco Asian-American Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Philadelphia Film Festival. For more in the 2005 Philadelphia Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
25-Mar-2005 (R)
DVD: 14-Nov-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A
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