02/06/10 - Oldboy (Old Boy)

Oldboy (Old Boy) (2003, 120 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364569/

I'd heard tons of good stuff about Oldboy from online. I basically equated it to a Memento-esque film because I was under the impression it had a crazy bizarre twist at the end that you never saw coming. Sometimes these movies are great and sometimes they're really bad, so I was both excited and a little leery about checking this out.

The film follows Dae-su Oh (Min-sik Choi) following an imprisonment of fifteen years. Following his release he meets and falls in love with Mi-do (Hye-jeong Kang). Later on we learn that Woo-jin Lee (Ji-tae Yu) was behind all of this due to a rumor Dae-su started back in high school.

Obviously, not speaking Korean, much of the acting quality was lost on me due to having to rely on subtitles. However, I can say that Min-sik Choi gives what seems to be an amazing performance. Notably, there's a long sequence at the end (which I read now was mostly ad-libbed by Min-sik Choi) where he essentially gives an impassioned monologue. It's clearly the most emotional point in the entire movie and Min-wik Choi handles it really well, giving a great and convincing performance here. The movie really revolves around him to the point where the other characters just kind of come in and out of scenes as necessary to the plot. They act well but I never felt like anything jumped out at me from these performances.

Obviously, Oldboy is about the story and the concluding twist. Now, there's some movies that do this kind of twist great (Memento, The Sixth Sense) and some that do it terribly (Donnie Darko, The Usual Suspects) and then some that are so twisted you don't know what to say (Mulholland Dr.). Fortunately, Oldboy falls in the first category. Oldboy doesn't give clues (in my opinion) that would allow you to figure everything on the first watch. But (and this is important) it doesn't come off with an "Aha! We fooled you!" attitude after the twist which is great. It kind of slowly reveals the twist and then lets it sink in and then continues along with the story. I really like how it's handled. That's not to say that it'd be great on a second viewing since I don't believe there's enough clues scattered around to figure it out. I guess you could argue that this makes the purpose of the twist to just make the movie as vulgar and strange as possible. While I can see how this point could be argued, I feel the rest of the movie presents itself in a way that negates this argument enough. But I can see easily see how this movie can be regarded as trash.

The movie also raises some interesting points. I will admit that I'm completely unaware of pretty much everything Korean (besides that they really really like StarCraft) but this imprisonment system is just overly bizarre. For fifteen years we have a guy locked up away from family, friends and outside life. Obviously when I watched this I thought about what this would be like. Losing fifteen years of my life would be beyond horrendous and I can't imagine what it would be like. I think overall the film does a good job at trying to drive this point home but sometimes I feel it focuses too much on his family that he's lost and not enough on just the entire shifts of society that have occurred in this span. They could have done a lot more than they did.

Finally, I'd like to comment on one specific shot. This sequence will be remembered by me for quite some time and was far and away the most technically impressive scene I'd seen in quite some time. The scene was probably three minutes long and consisted of one long cut showing Dae-su fighting a bunch of guys in a hallway. It really reminded me of the long cut in 300 both in style and subject matter. It was really cool to see how flawless everything seemed to work together and just the overall precision that was visible here. Simply great.

Overall, I gave this film a 7/10. Oldboy is one of the better movies with a surprising twist at the end. It handled this point phenomenally well and that's probably why it's so praised on the internet discussion boards. But the rest of the movie has some bad points that I brought up and some of the secondary characters (pretty much everyone besides Dae-su) give mostly mediocre performances. Basically, the movie rests on how much the viewer likes the twist and fortunately for me I found it pretty enjoyable.