"School is finished, now it's time for your homework, isn't it?"

Rating: 8/10 (21 September 2014)

I've been searching my memory banks for about twenty four hours now and I can't really come up with a movie I've seen with a more twisted story line than this one. I didn't really like the film and don't feel compelled to ever watch it again unless it's to prove that point to someone else.
Here's the thing - I've read some of the positive reviews for the picture on this board and I'm seeing kudos for things like the screenplay, acting, cinematography, plot, music, and it's intelligence, symbolism and beauty. None of them it seems really gets to the heart of the matter. The story, without nuance, has to do with a man, Oh Dae-su, who as a teenager, witnessed schoolmate Lee Woo-Jin molesting his own sister. The girl subsequently commits suicide, (whether she became pregnant or not seems beside the point because the viewer is allowed to have it both ways), and in his sick quest for revenge, Lee Woo-Jin embarks on a fifteen year mission to imprison Oh Dae-su and arrange to have him AND his daughter hypnotized into falling in love with each other, thereby engaging in an incestuous relationship.
So what's so symbolic, intelligent and beautiful about that? Look, I'm not a prude and I guess I'd have to admit that it took some kind of uniquely creative mind to come up with this story. But why? At one point it seemed like the larger issue being dealt with had to do with Oh Dae-su's mission once freed, was he now on a quest for revenge or the truth? That would have been a much more satisfying story if you didn't have the incest angle. And on top of that, Lee Woo-jin would have been behind the murder of Oh Dae-su's wife in order to engineer this whole scenario. Why Oh Dae-su failed to attack Lee and instead turn into a pile of mush near the end of the story just didn't make sense to me, what with all the gory violence and dental hysterics that went before.
Now here's something that I noticed, and this was a real head scratcher. This is on top of the age difference between the two principal characters, fourteen years in real life and looking every bit the same difference in the picture, even though they were schoolmates together. If you keep a close eye on the scene when Lee Woo-jin recalls his sister falling from the bridge, the first cutaway shows his hand with half a pinky missing! Then you see his hand again and all his fingers are intact. Was that deliberate? A mistake? Why was it done that way? Inquiring minds want to know.
So anyway, with all my ranting on the picture, I can concede that it was well put together with a coherent, even if somewhat implausible story. But should it be in IMDb's list of Top 100 Films? That's why I picked it up to watch after all, and leads me to question how these rankings get put together. Then again, I already did that and that's another thing that doesn't make sense to me.