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 Dr Nick
"A violent, beautiful, disgusting, exciting and breathtaking experience"
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SCREENED AT THE EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2004: This was one of the weirdest (in a good way) experiences I have ever had in the cinema. Not an easy film to watch or to follow but nonetheless extremely powerful and thought-provoking. This is brutal and uncompromising filmmaking at its best. An intense story, essentially about revenge and holding a grudge, this will give you things to talk about for ages afterwards. If only all films were this mindblowing.Dae-su is a happily married man with a young daughter. One day he is kidnapped and wakes up in a cell with nothing but a television to entertain him. No explanation is given to him, nor is he given any details of any eventual release. Days turn to months and eventually years, without him ever seeing a human face. On the television he watches news of his wife being murdered and himself being the main suspect, but unable to do anything about it he starts to exercise and plan his revenge. After being kept in the cell for fifteen years, he is finally released. He wakes up on the roof of a building wearing a suit, with a wallet full of money and a mobile phone. In a nearby restaurant he befriends a pretty waitress, Mido, and together they try to find out who held him captive for fifteen years. Dae-su manages to track down the man responsible, Woo-jin, and is about to kill him when the tables are turned. Woo-jin points out that if he kills him now, then he will never find out why he was held captured for so long. Woo-jin gives him a deadline. Find the reason in less than five days or he will kill Mido, Dae-su?s new love. If he succeeds Woo-jin will kill himself. Dae-su has to search deep in his past and eventually finds out that Woo-jin and himself went to the same high school, and that he once walked in on Woo-jin having sex with his own sister. Dae-sun told everyone in school, resulting in Woo-jin?s sister committing suicide. Thinking he has found the reason, he returns to Woo-yin. But another question remains. Why was he released? Things are about to get really weird?
I don?t want to give too much away. It is a very complex plot, and the less you know the more impact it will have on you. It just completely blew me away. I honestly can?t remember the last time I felt this amazed by a film. I know I?m using clichéd phrases here, but if there ever was a time to use the description ?a roller-coaster of emotions? this is it. This film will make you feel every feeling imaginable. It?s exciting, funny, scary, disgusting, romantic, moving and extremely disturbing, all at the same time.
So, is it a good film technically? Is it well put together? I can?t find find much wrong about this film. If I had to pick something, then it would be that some of the scene transitions are a bit overused and quite cheesy. But, apart from this minor complaint it?s a solid, highly confident piece of work. The performances are strong throughout, and the cinematography is as harsh, cold and strangely beautiful as the film itself.
We?ve come to expect graphic violence from modern Asian films, and Old Boy is no exception. Amongst beautifully staged fight scenes you get teeth getting pulled out with hammers, as well as tongues getting cut off. The tooth-pulling scene is particularly horrible, being in the same league, if not even worse than infamous tooth-related scenes in films such as Marathon Man and Last House on The Left. We also find out that if you follow a strict routine of nothing but exercise and television for fifteen years, you?re going to be pretty hard to kill. In what?s a very impressive fight scene, Dae-su is attacked by twenty men and not only survives, but wins. After fifteen years of punching a brick wall, a human body is not really much of an obstacle.
The film is also strangely moving. When Dae-su is released from his imprisonment, we get to share his very first feelings of freedom. The first sight of the sky, the first touch of grass. There?s a stranger on the roof and when Dae-su gets to feel the skin of another human being for the first time in fifteen moments, it is a truly touching (no pun intended) moment. But, in this film good things don?t usually last very long and soon the stranger continues with what he was up there to do in the first place, which was to commit suicide.
There?s nothing quite like a film that gets under your skin, that really makes you think. When you finally think you?ve got it all figured out, something completely unexpected comes up and all your ideas of what?s going on are completely shattered. Old Boy demands the full attention of the audience and if you're prepared to commit yourself to this film, it is an extremely rewarding experience.Raw and powerful, Old Boy deals with real human emotions. No attempt has been made to make this an easy ride, not for Dae-su himself, or the audience. And why should it be easy? Life is hard. Life isn?t straight-forward and in a world that?s gone mad there?s definitely not much room for happy resolutions. If you want intelligent and thought-provoking cinema, look no further. It doesn?t get much better than this.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=10328&reviewer=345
originally posted: 08/18/04 18:44:05
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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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