The Bailey Review: OLDBOY (2013)

SYNOPSIS:

From the moment I heard Hollywood was tackling an interpretation of Old Boy, I thought, “Why?! Why would you feel the need to put this story in another live-action format? South Korea did an amazing job adapting the manga into another art form. It’s perfect! Leave it alone! Why am I still talking to myself? Whyyyyy??!!”.

I remember hearing Spielberg’s name attached with Will Smith to star, and then eventually the Spike Lee/Josh Brolin pairing. I try to keep an open mind when I see any film. I love movies so much. They are my favorite form of escapism. But Chan-wook Park’s adaptation, let alone his entire revenge trilogy in which Oldboy is the second film (the first being Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and the last being Sympathy for Lady Vengeance), is perfect to me. I don’t want to compare two completely different filmmakers from two completely different parts of the globe, but it’s extremely hard not to.

That being said, I will focus this review on what Spike Lee did with his version, and just keep in mind that Chan-wook Park’s film is maybe in my top five films of all time, and is a must-own. I will also not give away spoilers and twists, in case anyone is clueless as to what unravels. However, if you’re on this blog, you probably are a fan of the manga and Korean film anyway.

Spike Lee‘s Oldboy opens in 1993 with a very unlikable, drunk and horny man named Joe Doucett (Josh Brolin), hitting on women he probably shouldn’t be hitting on, loosely talking about a daughter he probably shouldn’t be raising, and visiting a friend’s bar after hours, for drinks he probably shouldn’t be drinking.

Joe then wakes up in a sleazy motel room with fake windows, bad carpeting, and a frightening poster of a bellhop only Spike Lee could concoct and justify. Joe is never told why he is there, is fed dumplings through a slot at the base of the locked door by someone who won’t give him the time of day, and gets his only information about the outside world via a television with limited channels.

Days and weeks pass, during which time, he is drugged with a sleeping gas while those keeping him collect hair and saliva samples off his body. One day, Joe learns from a news broadcast that his ex-wife has been raped and murdered, leaving his daughter behind, and… wait for it… he’s the prime suspect! His DNA samples were found at the scene! But he was locked in a room! He was framed! And he’s such a likable guy, too! How tragic. 🙁

Then the film shows us a montage of suicide attempts, new presidents being inducted on the TV screen, and training hard to slim down that sort of muscly gut like Carl Weathers had in Predator. This takes about twenty minutes of film time to represent twenty years. If you remember the trailers for this film, “twenty years” was said about forty acres and a mule times. The Old Boy manga only keeps him in the room ten years, the Korean film fifteen, but it’s a much harder life out here in America, right? 

Joe is set free and the rest of the film involves him trying to find his now grown daughter and make amends, and find who imprisoned him for fifty-oops, I mean twenty years. He is still no more likable, but makes up for it by being skilled at hand-to-hand combat, and the hope is that the audience wants to answer the same questions as Joe. However, maybe the question we should really be asking ourselves is, “Why was he released?” Hmmmmm??

Knowing what I knew from how the Korean film presented its unraveling of events, I wasn’t sure how Hollywood would handle that material. Would these ideas of family, revenge, honor, and regret be as palatable in America where everything is fast food and bullshit, or would this film find a way to make us do some deeper soul searching and see it as a cautionary tale about how even the smallest lapses in judgment can create devastating ripples in the context of the rest of your life. To me, it did not accomplish that. 

This film felt like a means to showcase some brutal action (amazingly done by JJ “Loco” Perry and his stunt crew) and almost like it was poking fun at a story which is deeply horrific on every level. The music score by Roque Baños went on and on, underscoring moments where silence would have been preferred, especially during Joe’s solitary confinement and the big reveal at the end. If the film is good enough, music isn’t needed to convince me how to feel. I will simply feel it. Josh Brolin did well, as did Elizabeth Olsen. Samuel L. Jackson was Samuel L. Jackson. Sharlto Copley, who I was most excited to see after watching District 9, Elysium, and Europa Report, seemed to be directed to play his character as a cartoon, not a real person. I had difficulty seeing any real intentions behind his actions, even after his motives are discovered.

I had hoped that going into this film with low expectations would put me in a position to come away pleasantly surprised. However, it met my expectations exactly. I understand that this version is cutdown by an hour from what Spike Lee had intended, but I’m not convinced that the extra hour would have changed my opinion. The entire relationship and reasoning behind why Joe was imprisoned were changed for this film, and I don’t understand why. The twist works so well in the other versions for very calculated reasons. We feel like perhaps Joe’s character in Park’s film, named Dae-su Oh (played brilliantly by Min-sik Choi) deserved to be imprisoned. You feel every twist of that film deep in your gut, and it’s not even slightly as graphic as Lee‘s film. I’m not sure if I should blame Spike or Mark Protosevich, who wrote the screenplay. I enjoyed what he did with The Cell, and I Am Legend wasn’t too bad, but to have such amazing source material and abandon what makes it heavy and lasting seems odd to me.

I do still recommend you see it for yourself, especially if you’re a fan of Park’s incarnation, and maybe you’ll be satisfied with what’s in front of you. The choreography is fantastic, as is the camera work in these moments. I can’t say that enough. I only wish the rest of the film had that same intensity. Here’s hoping Inside Man 2 sees the light of day.

Directed and produced by Spike Lee, Oldboy is produced by Doug Davison and Roy Lee, and executive produced by Nathan Kahane, Peter Schlessel, Dong-Joo Kim and John Powers Middleton. The film is written by Mark Protosevich and stars Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Olsen, James Ransone Sharlto Copley and Samuel L. Jackson. 

This review was written for Film Combat Syndicate by Darren Bailey, actor, writer, stunt coordinator and co-founder of Thousand Pounds Action Company. Follow @Darren_Bailey on Twitter.