Poetry in Motion

Rating: 10/10 (23 March 2006)

one of the most up-and-coming film makers of the day is one Chanwook Park, an auteur from South Korea who just may go down in the history books as the 21st centuries first great storyteller.
Revenge. the word itself denotes a certain tingle on the back of your neck. we all know what it means, some of us have even been a part of it's tangled web. Vengeance is the culmination of almost every emotion the human mind is capable of understanding, and some we don't. Chanwook Park has written, directed and produced three film that tackle the psychology, philosophy and grand theme of vengeance, and Oldboy is the second installment and probably the most important.
the story is quite convoluted, and much of it should be left to be witnessed with virgin eyes and ears, but sufficing to say that a sully drunk named Oh Dae Su is captured by a man with a purple umbrella one rainy evening after a few hours in the drunk tank. he is kept in a small motel room with a fake window, a TV, an eerie painting and a gas pipe for the duration of 15 years. during this time, he witnesses his wife and child murdered on the 11 o'clock news, and he is framed for it. Dae Su sort of goes into a slow state of focused madness. his body becomes tough and trained, his hair becomes shaggy and beast-like, and his wrist becomes an hourglass, counting the years in checks until his release. When Dae Su is released, he is no longer Dae su, but something else, he's a beast, a monster, an unstoppable force of vengeance created by the rage and sorrow of the former Dae su. he still looks like the same disheveled 40-something, but there is a deadness to him, a crouching killer waiting to spring on his pray- the people who killed his family and put him in that horrible place, but with all the anger inside Dae Su, there still lurks a very human being, one so desperate for contact with another life after 15 years of deprivation, he consumes a living creature as his first meal upon release. this is only the first half hour of the film, and it's really the simplest part of the plot to explain- a precurser. this should give you an idea of how deep and dark this film plunges into the human psyche. for all it's cartoonish moments and stylish look and feel, Oldboy is unmatched in its well of emotion and deeply human story. you are not asked to take what you see as literal occurrence, but rather to accept what you see and draw meaning from it. there are some scenes many people find obligatory, consciously shocking or just plain gross, but they are all necessary in order to understand the epicness of this tale.
on a technical scale, Park has taken a complete divergance from his previous effort- Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and instead gone into a kind of surrealist filmnoir-meets-hong-Kong wonder-world from which this fantastical story can be properly told in the grandios form it requires.
a lot of people disliked the ending to this movie, and if you watch this film the same way you watch something like Fight Club or Memento (both fine films) then you wont like it either, but this isn't fight club or memento, this is Shakespeare, this is Homer, this is what lies beneath the gloss and dirt. the core. the story itself is unimportant, it's what the story implies that makes it a masterpiece.
i mourn the idea of remaking this film, giving the helm to the man who'll do Fast and the Furious 3, and making the main character go to prison rather than the original mysterious hotel room. all the things that make Oldboy Oldboy are gone, and all we're left with is the homage of someone who obviously missed the point. so i urge you to see this version of the story before it becomes a bastardized memory of itself stuffed into a Pepsi advertisement.