Greek Tragedy meets Saw via Kill Bill and Lucky Number Slevin.

Rating: 6/10 (10 May 2013)

I just finished watching Oldboy, the original language version.
First off, the very core of the film; the aspect of this film that most of its most ardent defenders point to as being so substantially original and wholeheartedly moving is the notion of incest and the complications arising from having inadvertently become entangled in such a dilemma.
Unfortunately for most people who worship this film, this idea has been worked before. It's been worked so thoroughly, in fact, that it's thousands of years old. That's right - it's not original. Sigmund Freud (do you know who he is?) based a huge chunk of his theory of psychodynamic psychotherapy on the source material: Oedipus the King.
Short history lesson: If you didn't learn this at University or didn't go to University or pay attention in high school, you might have missed the portion where you learned about "Greek Tragedy". That's what Oedipus the King is. Oedipus the King was written in the year 429 BCE by Sophocles.
I will not digress into the intricacies of Greek Tragedy here; the fact that people in this day and age find inferior derivative products to be works of sheer masterpiece speaks volumes on its own. If a cheap 2500 year old rip-off pop culture gore-fest like Oldboy is a masterpiece, what is Sophocles tragedy?
I implore those of you who are younger or uneducated on the topic to delve more into the area of the classics ... read works like Antigone, The Iliad ... etc. If this film kindled a fire for this sort of moral conundrum/tale of horrible destiny in you, then please go study the classics more (by classics I don't mean The Godfather; I mean the Classics with a capital C - Greek, Roman, Dante, etc.)
If all it takes to produce a masterpiece is to take the core of somebody else's 2500 year old Greek tragedy (which in themselves became morose in their commonality during their time), add slick production value, violence and extreme gore to make a masterpiece - then I'm done with the notion of evaluating or participating in the debate over film.
Make sure to take a very long look at a film before you're swept away with its material. Make sure it's not stolen; make sure you're educated before you go to the movie theater. It's a damn shame if you have seen "Oldboy" before you've read Romeo and Juliet, your basic canon of Greek tragedy, etc.
So, what qualifies as original? That's up to you as a viewer. Find something that is more modern in its philosophy. Just hypothetically - existentialism is much newer (relatively) than Greek Tragedy. If a film bases the core of its ideas and plot on something much more dynamic and current such as this, they're actually contributing to OUR era. CREATING something.
Oldboy has created nothing; it is less than the sum of its parts: A derived Greek Tragedy combined with excessive gore, excessive stylization and excessive reliance on modern scenery to shroud an eternal theme.
Take these elements and you have, at best, a Saw level film with twists and turns ... throw in a bit of The Crying Game and Kill Bill and viola.
I prize originality above all else. I found none here; overrating a film based on the misconception of originality is a big pet peeve of this critic.
6/10 for good cinematography, acting and adaptation of a very old idea.