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Rating: 10/10 (13 November 2005)

I found Oldboy to be one of the greatest movies I have ever seen and for simple reasons. As a student of acting and of play history, it amazes me how so many of the "critics" on this website view this movie with dull disinterest or even disdain. This movie captures the audience immediately with its breathtaking cinematography and inherent mystery, of which, I assure, there is more to be found. The film is best viewed in the original Korean with subtitles to get the truest performance possible (if you don't speak Korean, that is) from the actors who tackle emotional and psychological subjects reminiscent of Hamlet or Macbeth. The allusions of this story to the Dumas novel The Count of Monte Cristo do not diminish from this movie, but only serve to impress me further by the way a classic theme of isolation and vengeance can be built upon and heightened today, especially via the realm of South Korean cinema. The violence, twists, and revelations which occur during this movie are not of the same variety found in most cheap Hollywood movies you might see today because no matter how unlikely, or perhaps even implausible, they might be, they are only so because they are on the most extreme of human experiences. And, because of this, the actions taken by the characters all lie firmly embedded somewhere in the universal human psyche. The choices made by the characters are not nearly as far-fetched as those made by say the average character of an average TV drama, going into a ridiculous situation with ridiculous causes. Rather, these are characters driven by goals which stem from real strain built onto believable people. Every character has a journey, every character has a revelation, and every character faces them-self. To highlight the extraordinariness of this movie, the director and cinematographer were also clever enough to know when these moments are, and paint them with a clarity that can be summed up as other-worldly. Yes, the violence is shocking at times, and maybe it stretches one or two scientific concepts, but the movie is still in one word: artful. It is art because I am here typing this at 3 in the morning, enraged at how so many could pass this movie off as shock cinema because their puritan minds could not fathom so extreme a case as this one. What would happen if Andy Dufrain was not so sweet an individual, but one who cried out for revenge like Hamlet? That is what this story is. This movie is special because it touches on what most of us cannot even begin to imagine. I will not ruin the ending, but I will say that the reason Oh-Daesu is imprisoned is something that I think all audience members will leave knowing they are guilty of as well. Humanity is special. Oldboy is special.