Review #718: 'Oldboy' (2013)

The recent splurge of Hollywood remakes of successful Asian exports have damaged the credibility of the remake, or the 're-visioning', as some of the more self-respecting directors dub them. It's east to forget that filtering a famous story through another artist's vision can produce great results, and without remakes we wouldn't have the likes of The Maltese Falcon (1941), A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Fly (1986). When Hollywood got it's grubby hands on the rights to a remake of Chan-wook Park's idiosyncratic modern classic Oldboy (2003), fans were up in arms. How would this story of octopus-munching and incest translate to an American audience? Then, Spike Lee was on board to direct, and people were as intrigued as they were confused.

Josh Brolin is Joe Doucett, a scumbag salesman who repeatedly drinks on the job and makes inappropriate passes at his clients girlfriend's. After another night of heavy-drinking and missing his daughter's birthday, he meets a woman with a yellow umbrella. The next morning, he wakes up to find himself in what looks like a hotel room, but is actually a prison in which he'll spend the next twenty years. Given Chinese food and vodka to consume every day, and seeing the news of his wife's murder and his daughter's adoption on the news, Joe eventually attempts suicide. He is saved, with the aid of his captors, and starts a vigorous routine in which he prepares for revenge. Then one day, he wakes up in the middle of a field with a cell phone and a lot of questions.

I'll just establish that I was never on board with this remake, even with the intriguing notion that Spike Lee was to direct. Yet Lee was adamant that this is a re-imagining from the original manga text, so I gave it a go. The many homages aside (the octopus, angel wings, the extended hallway fight), 2013's Oldboy does manage to be a film in it's own right. We learn more about Joe before he is captured, and Josh Brolin gives a strong performance as a character that is certainly angrier than Min-sik Choi's Dae-su Oh. This is evident from a beating he gives a young group of jocks, elbowing and stamping, and Lee's film is certainly bloodier. There is also more development given to the young woman who takes pity on Joe, and is played with a fearlessness by the lovely Elizabeth Olsen.

But where Oldboy fails wholeheartedly is the juggling of tone. Beginning with a grainy, handheld 16mm, the sense of reality is thrown out the window come Joe's release. We are introduced to bad guys such as Chaney (Samuel L. Jackson), who dresses like he belongs in the world of Willy Wonka (is there anything this man will not wear?), and the main antagonist Adrian (Sharlto Copley), a big bad so cartoonish that he may as well be twirling a moustache. In Chan-wook Park's movie, the shifts in tone suited the director's style as well the whole general strangeness that comes out of the Asian movie industry, but here it is handled so clunkily that it often comes off a simply laughable. Anyone unfamiliar with the original must find the whole experience simply perplexing.

Ultimately, this isn't a bad effort. I have to applaud it for at least trying to be it's own movie, rather than a carbon copy of a film that was always going to be it's superior. The tweaks and small additions have added little to the story and, if anything, made it more easily accessible. What worked so well for Park's original was it's refusal to abide by the normal storytelling rules, whereas Lee often tries to spoon-feed this strange tale and force it into a conventional and familiar Hollywood narrative. Like the film's protagonist, you can't simply put a story like this into a cage and expect people to enjoy looking at it, you've got to prod it with a stick, let it loose and scare the shit out of everyone. But thankfully, Spike Lee seems to have finally realised that they're called films, not joints.


Directed by: Spike Lee
Starring: Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Olsen, Sharlto Copley, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Imperioli
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie