Stylish!

Rating: 9/10 (25 March 2005)

This was a real surprise to me. I'd heard various tales of how violent the film is and was expecting some kind of lame gangster thriller. In fact, 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. I hope it doesn't give too much away to say that, at the end, the villain dies, the hero lives and he gets the girl. But the circumstances of this denouement are so dark and twisted that it takes a while to sink in.
A very good, very stylish, very twisted film; I'd love to see more like it.