Very good foreign movie. Pretty intense and shocking. A-

Snrub, next time, check the damn archive.

I did! I looked through a crap-load of pages (must've just missed it, I guess) and did a search for "Old Boy" (I'm guessing the space messed up the search a little).

Anyway, sorry Zing-oh.

Did you check the "Thread Archive" thread on the top of the page? :wink:

Old Boy

By Snrub

Before grabbing a copy of Old Boy, I hadn't seen any reviews, I'd read only the briefest blurb describing its plot and I'd never heard of Chan Wook Park or Sympathy for Mr Vengeance. All I'd heard was that it was about a man who gets locked away for fifteen years with no explanation and that Tarantino thought it was amazing. Not much to go on, but certainly enough to get me wetting myself in excitement and swiftly departing with my hard-earned cash. Unfortunately, it seems it was also just enough to get me coming away disappointed. There's no denying Old Boy's ambitions, and in the first half of the film it comes tantalisingly close to fulfilling them, but as the rest unfolds the film falls disappointingly flat.

After a brief opening sequence where a crazy-haired fellow holds a man over a rooftop by his tie, we're thrust into flashback mode and introduced to said crazy-haired fellow fifteen years earlier as he sits in a police station acting drunk and disorderly. He sings songs, acts the fool and eventually gets himself handcuffed to a bench. After being bailed out by a friend, he calls home from a payphone to wish his daughter a happy birthday and then disappears from sight. For the next fifteen years, Oh Dae Su is locked in a room with no explanation and only a TV for company.

When he's finally released (onto the roof we see at the beginning of the film, in a rather tenuous wrap-around for the flashback), he's a changed man, having spent the majority of the fifteen years locked away training himself, punching walls and adopting the aforementioned crazy-hair. Determined for revenge, he sets out to unravel the mystery behind his captivity and hurt a lot of people in the process.

The first half of Old Boy is truly remarkable. The visual tricks employed to maintain the viewer's interest during his time in captivity are stunning, and you're never less than rapt by the proceedings. Oh Dae Su's subsequent quest to kill the man who locked him away is thrilling stuff, and moments of inspired violence (such as a sequence in a hallway involving Oh Dae Su, a swarm of men and a hammer) gave me high hopes for the remainder of the film.

Unfortunately, the film struggles to maintain the sparkling tone the first half sets up. In fact, all of the film's missteps take place in the second half - the first of which was probably casting what looks like an 18 year-old pretty boy in the role of the villain. The second misstep goes much deeper, and harms the film irreparably.

For the first hour, Oh Dae Su's an unstoppable force, determined to kill the man who put him in captivity and drove him to the edge of his sanity. Then, all of a sudden, the film changes tack and turns into The Vanishing. The moment Oh Dae Su finds the man who locked him away for fifteen years, he becomes obsessed with uncovering why he was locked away for fifteen years. Instead of just killing the bloke then and there, he inexplicably plays right into his game. A game that - much like the eventual explanation behind Oh Dae Su's incarceration - just isn't all that believable. Arnold had the right idea in Commando - why play along with a villain's scheme when you can eschew convention and blow everything up without a second thought.


As the story unfolds, and a (transparently twist-centric) relationship blossoms between Oh Dae Su and a beautiful waitress, we're subjected to boring expository monologues and flashbacks which are completely at odds with the first half's take-no-prisoners style revenge tale. The eventual twist - one half of which should be easy to spot coming early on, the other half (namely the explanation behind the bad guy's grudge) not so much - actually manages to cheapen the first half's impact. Moreover, Oh Dae Su's reaction to one revelation is a bit too dramatic - almost as needlessly dramatic as the bad-guys decision to lock Oh Dae Su away for fifteen years. Frankly, the film's at its best when things are left to the imagination. The moment solving the mystery becomes its primary focus is the moment the film begins to lose its way.

By the time the end nears, Old Boy has become little more than a series of overreactions. The villain clearly overreacted when he locked Oh Dae Su away for fifteen years, Oh Dae Su overreacts when he finds out why he was locked away for fifteen years, and Tarantino certainly overreacted when he sang the film's praises at last year's Cannes. Ultimately, it's a sterling premise for a revenge film, butchered by a desire to add layers to its deliciously pulpy roots.

Overall Grade: C

Obviously not, duh!!

...

Sorry...

Oldboy is an exquisitely/excruciatingly imaginative revenge fantasy/nightmare...

It is surefootedly cinematic in much the same way that "Cine" City is...

It is an ultra-dark portrayal of the worst aspects of what it means to be human...

It is the Korean Memento with all the cultural pleasures/barriers that might suggest to you...

It's really much better freakin' well done than you ever might hope for an artsy foreign vengeance flick...

5 out of 5.

(Note: This movie would make the ultimate Heaven & Hell double bill with the outstanding 1998 Japanese movie After Life by director Hirokazu Koreeda -- Warning - I highly recommend that you watch Oldboy first!)

B+

Brutal, powerful, well-crafted movie with great performances all around and a twist ending to die for. Unfortunately drags quite a bit in the middle. I highly recommend it to all fans of Asian cinema, though.

C-/D+

A glorified snuff film with no real redeeming value. Its just gross gross gross and to think I was led to believe that its a great quality film but the whole movie basically rides on the shock twist which was so overused in other films like the Crying Game. What can I say? Take away the shocking gimmack and you are left with a film thats the equivalent of Cannibalistic Holacust (poor squids :wink: )

This was a real surprise to me, didnt expect to like it this much. Old Boy is a very handsomely made, stylish revenge thriller which has the feel of a David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club) movie. The production values are top notch; excellent cinematography and musical score, and a number of surreal, dreamlike scenes which create the kind of edgy, not-quite-real atmosphere which the best Asian cinema does so well.

There is violence in this film, and indeed violence which could be called gratuitous, but the surreal world inhabited by this story makes the violence less disturbing than than the kind of gangland unpleasantness seen in films about South Central Los Angeles or East-end London. This is a comic-book adaptation with a clear 'anti-hero', heroine and villain and it delivers a fantastic twist on the standard Hollywood revenge thriller ending.

A very good, very stylish, very twisted film; I'd love to see more like it.

Grade - A-

*spoilers*

Ok, just finished watching this... I liked it. A lot.

The last 10 minutes kinda confused me. (with the album, I thought the pics of Mi Do were just... there so it took me a few minutes to find out she was his daughter... Heh.) That disturbed me, but I thought it was an excellent ending.

I'm probably going to watch it again before I send it back, but for now I'll give it an A-.

Wow, well that sucked the air right out of me. I think I'm going to need to see it again before I give it a grade, but I loved the visual style, and although I thought the twist was excellent, I do have to admit that I think there is a lot of questionable plot details about the film, especially involving said over-reacting. That said, I'm gonna need to sleep on this one.

The last 30 minutes of this film are somewhat disgusting, yet brilliant all at the same time.

However, it didn't quite make up for an unimpressive first hour and a half.

Overall, though, goooood. B

ps, i'm not bumping this i swear. :O

I was recommended to see this movie by a friend who then ruined the ending for me. Do you think its still worth it??

An absolute assualt on the Brain and a haunting examination of moral ambiguite and Love, Oldboy is about as far away from a hollywood movie as one can get, barring perhaps some exestential French nonsense where a man stares at his own shit for 90 minutes or something.

The violence is belief but incredibly viseral the hallway sequence being one of the best action scenes ever committed to film, but this film is more about mood and human examination.

I really do have difficulty in pinning it down as you can see, just watch it instead its well worth it.

A

A "glorified snuff film"? Hmmm...

Let's compare that to your review of the far inferior "glorified snuff film" called The Hills Have Eyes:



Interesting...

There was something significant that I noticed missing, but I just don't know what that was dammit.

Anyway, I enjoyed the film and I always love a twist (even if it wasn't THAT big) and ending left to the viewer to interpret. Really, a good bit of the film and not just the ending is left up to an individuals interpretation.

The "I loved my sister despite everything. Can you two do the same?" or however it went. Loved it.

8/10

Any relevance.

6/10.

'Explain yourself. I do not appreciate minimalist answers."

That does not bother me.

Narr.

This movie pretty much blows.

Superb film that is so much more than the twist ending unlike say, Se7en.