Was there really a plot twist ?

Rating: 7/10 (6 September 2017)

People tend to find me as a contrarian, but I think I am would be more of a rationalist. Oldboy has a nice "one liner" story line, but in my opinion, does not deliver in its most climactic point, at least as I have expected it to. The movie starts out with our main protagonist Dae-su, drunk in a police station on way home to his daughter's birthday. He never makes it home, because he gets kidnapped mysteriously and puts into a hotel- like prison for 15 years. At first I really liked this idea and where it was going. It was sort of Kafkaesque and abstract. I like to a certain extent surrealism in a movie, and I consider David Lynch one of the best at doing this. It never seems exaggerated, and the blend mystery with lust and sometime horror seems just right, all of it happening in our mind, because we are wired to think in patterns and in the dogma of society. Oldboy was somewhat trying to mimic this surreal motive, but in my opinion in an exaggerated, in your face kind of way. There are scenes in the movie that you get the symbolical aspect of it, but in a too direct way. I am not talking about the violence, I am OK with that, but rather the delivery itself of the symbolism itself is done with a shovel, in this case with a hammer. There is no subtleness about it. That is how it felt for me at least. Dae-su is an ordinary middle aged man, average in its all aspects. There is nothing special about him. But as soon as he is released from the "prison", he morphs into what other would call a bad ass, professional ass kicker. He is an Asian version of Neo from Matrix. I struggled a bit with this, as for the profoundness of the movie this seemed irrelevant. Before he is released from the prison he is hypnotized, but he seems to not remember it ever happened. Oldboy is one of those movies where the producer make a lot of cuts in the scenes. I am guessing this is one of the ways to intensify the agony and desperation the protagonist of the story endures. Again, here, the amount of cuts are simply too many in certain scenes. These are again a kind of exaggeration, a shoveling of "hey this means feelings" kind of message that really for me builds up, reaches a climax and the simply collapses due to overfilling. The story nevertheless continues with our protagonist trying to seek revenge on whoever has done this to him. He soon finds out WHO that is, but he wants to find out WHY was he punished. On his journey on finding the truth he falls in love with a young woman he finds in a restaurant. They make, love, they fight, they have trust issues and they grow together through the movie in search for the truth. One of the truths is that Woo-jin Lee, his capturer, was one of his high school colleagues. Dae-su also has a flash back where he sees Woo-jin Lee having incestuous relations with his own sister. Having seen this Dae-su spreads the news, like any other high school student would presumably do, and if I were him I would have also called the police. In the movie present this incest is presented from a very transcendental and profound point of view, where at the end of the day, blankly put, Woo-jin had sex with this sister. When his sister found out that people might know about this, she committed suicide. In the final scenes of the movie Dae-su, goes to confront Woo-jin in his penthouse where he also finds out the truth about why he was captured, that being, that he was hypnotized to fall in love with his own daughter as well. I cannot say I did not expect this, since the beginning of the movie was all about his daughter and then Woo-jin having sex with his' almost gave it away altogether for me. What I really don't get, is again, the over exaggerations in the last scene and more than this illogical actions of both protagonists After finding out the truth, Dae-su cuts his tongue and begs Woo-jin to not let his daughter know about this, and he licks his shoes, instead of wanting to destroy Woo-jin even more for the abuse he did on him. After this, Woo-jin leaves the room, has a short flash back with his sister's suicide and then kills himself. I am not really sure why he felt that he had to do that now, as he himself talk about revenge, but he did not convince me that revenge was his thing. I was more inclined to think that he was an incestuous psychopath. His suicide makes little logical sense to me The movie ends, though, in my opinion with a very nice twist. All throughout the movie Dae-su hears and is driven by this quote: "laugh and the world laughs with you weep and you weep alone". There are moments in the film where he does just this, but his laugh is not real, but rather a cringy grin that was supposed to replace, what would naturally be a weep. In the end, Dae-su goes on to ask the hypnotist to erase his memory so he would not remember what he has done with his daughter. He is outside, in the snow, when his daughter finds him and runs towards him and embraces him. She says she loves him. The movie ends with Dae-su, looking bleak in the distance and slowly starting his cringy grin. This end is interesting because you are left in a suspenseful where you don't really know if his memory was indeed erased and he does not remember what he did with his daughter or he is just grinning as he would usually do throughout the movie. 7/10