The problem with remakes is that you can’t unsee the original film, and that’s especially true of Chan-wook Park’s searing 2003 hit, Oldboy.
Spike Lee’s new version deviates in a lot of minor and a few important ways. But try as one might, a viewer cannot shake memories of the righteous and horrific violence and the shattering twists of the original.
It’s still the story of a man drugged, kidnapped and locked up, with no human contact, for 20 years. He gets out, furious and foaming at the mouth for revenge.
But this new Oldboy has a much longer prologue, suggesting that Joe Doucett (Josh Brolin) is enough of a drunken lout to actually deserve his life-altering fate. And there’s a Hollywood-style, spoon-fed epilogue that goes beyond merely explaining the reasons for what came before.
It doesn’t so much ruin the movie as misunderstand certain fundamentals about why the first version worked so very well.
Ad agency Joe drinks on the job and then, in an insane touch, comes on to a big client’s wife. Then he wakes up in a room with no phone, a rotating painting of an outdoor scene rather than a window, and a TV that shows him the decades passing him by in his solitary confinement.
He has been framed for the murder of his hated ex-wife. In between meals (always Chinese dumplings), gassings and shaves, he goes mad. Then, just as he’s about to make a break for it, he’s released. That’s when the revenge starts.
It’s a film that embraces ugliness: vomit and blood and gruesome death and bodily functions. The new version does a better job of showing the victim track down his tormentor, but a much worse job at teasing out suspense and intrigue as he does.
Lee, in a sort of humorless send-up of Quentin Tarantino, substitutes kinky for mystery, explicit sex and violence for sex and violence with real shock value.
Oldboy
C Directed by Spike Lee. R (strong, brutal violence, disturbing images, some graphic sexuality and nudity, and language). 120 mins. In wide release.
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