You will want to watch more than once

Rating: 9/10 (25 August 2010)

South Korea is enjoying a historical-first exporting of culture to the West. Americans have long been importing European culture, but with so much noise coming from the South Korean wave, now is the perfect time to take a look out east. And, as an introduction to a large library of outstanding Korean movies, Park Chan-Wook's 2003 thriller Oldboy will exemplify 21st century Korean art.
The storyline for Oldboy is hard to discuss without spoiling too many twists. On a random night, the protagonist Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-sik) is kidnapped outside a phone booth. He's then held in solitary confinement for fifteen years, receiving daily meals and arbitrary hair cuts. The day of his fifteenth year in prison, he's released and immediately starts investigating who imprisoned him and why.
The plot, while interesting, is not what gives this film the strength to survive a market saturated with thrillers. This movie is very smart for what one would expect in a thriller genre and carries many messages about revenge, violence, redemption and the ability to forget. When Oh figures out the reason for his incarceration, why is he dissatisfied? And even more poignant, why is the audience dissatisfied? A viewer expecting to turn his or her brain off as soon as action starts will probably miss what makes this such an amazing movie.
Oldboy's action sequences serve more purpose than to get the audience's heart pumping. Park Chan-Wook does an amazing job using action to reveal character motives and internal struggles. During one unedited scene, Oh battles through a hallway filled with gangsters wielding blunt weapons and knives. He isn't stronger, faster or better trained than any of his opponents, but instead fights on pure rage. At one point, Oh is stabbed in the back and falls to the ground while everyone surrounds him and assumes he's dead. Instead of something over the top, Oh does the only realistic thing that can be done at that point and uses a hammer to crush the feet of a few people around him. Frightened, his enemies jump back, giving Oh enough room to recover. The scene ends not when everyone is dead or unconscious, but instead the gangsters just don't want to fight. Oh staggers out, unpursued, because nobody wants to continue fighting a frothing caged animal.
Many critics comment on the violence in Oldboy. There is plenty of violence; enough for Quentin Tarantino to fall in love with the film and assist in awarding it a Grand Prix of the Jury at Cannes. But much of the violence occurs off-screen and in the head of the audience. During one scene, while Oh tortures someone that was in his path, the viewer sees less blood than any scene in Saw or The Expendables. But many will find themselves wincing since imagination fills in the rest of the details.
This is a movie that viewers will likely rewatch. Except for a few gems, this summer has been lackluster in memorable films. The best way to end summer is to grit your teeth and read some subtitles (the movie is dubbed in English, but the speakers can't capture the same level of emotion), and take a look at how artistic and wonderful the thriller genre can be in the right hands. Erik Hagen