What am I missing?

Rating: 1/10 (25 April 2005)

This movie was awful, plain and simple. It will probably be revered by those who only see "films" and not "movies" and will therefore feel sorry for me for having such a limited understanding of the theatrical brilliance of this film, but I am secure enough in my intellect to say that this boring, self-aggrandizing and painfully drawn-out movie was a waste of two hours and nine dollars.
I was suckered into seeing this by the inexplicable good reviews it had been receiving and came out of the theater thinking that those reviews had to have been written by over-excited film students and the aforementioned group of individuals who shun regular movies, perhaps for fear that they may actually enjoy one someday.
The storyline is quite a promising one - a man is imprisoned for 15 years, never knowing his captor nor his crime. He is then abruptly released and given just five days to discover the identity and reason of the man who imprisoned him. However, the great concept soon disintegrates into a pathetic joke as Oh Dae-Su runs around beating people up, trying to have sex with a young girl who is attempting to use the toilet and eating a live, writhing squid (presumably for dramatic effect, as there is absolutely no other reason for it). All the while he is trying to figure out this horrible thing he did to earn himself fifteen years in jail, and when he finally finds out it is both ridiculous and a major letdown. His nemesis, a man who supposedly went to school with him when he was a young man, looks like a Banana Republic model twenty years younger than him. Hey, I know prison has been hard on Oh Dae-Su, but is it too much to ask to find an actor that looks a bit closer to his age? Of all the things wrong with this movie, this one seems like the easiest one to fix.
And the big secret - the one that kept me in my seat for 90 minutes when I could have been out doing something productive - is some joke of a plot line involving incest and a rumor started in high school. Come on! Throw us a bone here - was that really the best they could do? I sat through stupid dialogue, over-acting, gloomy sets and gratuitous violence for this? (By the way - I'm not at all against violence in a film if it seems to fit the story, but in this case it seems I was forced to watch our hero knock out someone's front teeth and cut off his own tongue with a pair of scissors in order to distract me from figuring out I was wasting my afternoon watching a pretentious piece of garbage).
Take my advice - do something else with your time and money. Or take your nine dollars and go see a lowly "movie" - one that you might actually enjoy.