Oldboy
R
2005
*** out of ****

This Korean action/drama is a somewhat strange piece of work. This is the first in director Chan-wook Park’s “vengeance” trilogy (followed by “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and “Lady Vengeance”, neither of which I have yet seen).

Premise: A man is kidnapped off the street and imprisoned in one room for fifteen years. Furious and desperate, all his pleas for an explanation ignored, he swears to escape and wreak vengeance on whoever is responsible for his predicament. Suddenly, he is released. Of course the first thing he does is go out and meet a girl, who starts trying to help him discover the mystery of his kidnapping. When he starts to get close to unraveling the knot, the man who imprisoned him shows up and gives five days to discover who his kidnapper is and why he was imprisoned, or the girl he has met and fallen in love with will be killed. Thus the race is on, and with the aid of an old friend and the girl, the main character, Oh Dae Sun, plows headlong for the movie’s shocking conclusion.

If nothing else, this movie is original - I can safely say that I’ve never seen anything quite like it. And I have seen a lot of movies.



When I rented this I was expecting a straight up action movie. I was wrong. The deeper the story goes the more twisted it gets, involving hypnosis, incest, and murder, and ends with a shocking conclusion. The film is also surprisingly visualy artistic, throwing in interesting bits of cinematography and gimics every once in a while. I was taken aback at a few of the scenes (including a lovely little incident where the main character pries out a man’s teeth with the claw end of a hammer), I was pleasantly surprised with the movie, and ended up appreciating it quite a bit.

The acting was good - not spectacular, but not bad, either. The story is excellent, and hard to predict, which is refreshing. The final twist at the end is definitely not something that you’ll guess. For once I don’t really have anything bad to point out about the movie - It’s hard for me to pinpoint specific negative qualities for this particular film. It tells a good story, and it tells it very well with all the mysteries explained at the end, but it doesn’t really start to suck you in for a while. And the bad guy isn’t quite as convincing as you would expect him to be. The actor was fine - I think it was the way the character was written.

Anyway, if you don’t mind your movies a little (or a lot) twisted, this film is definitely worth watching.