A rather disappointing effort

Rating: 5/10 (29 September 2004)

Old Boy sucks! No, wait, let me rephrase that: Old Boy is a stylistically challenging, highly innovative, but ultimately hollow and repugnant exercise in genre film-making.
And just to let you know where I'm coming from  'Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance' was brilliant; an unforgiving and touching descent into doom. In that movie everything that happened somehow had to. One action triggered the next one and we experienced a vicious circle of violence and revenge. The characters seemed trapped in their situation.
In Old Boy our protagonist is also trapped, but you know the story, so I won't tell you again. So he's in this room and there is great sound design and camera work. But once he frees himself, the complications and problems multiply. The plot is at first close to incomprehensible as he stumbles from one situation to another. When the villain explains his schemes at the end and brings enlightenment, I just couldn't care anymore. The intriguing premise is destroyed by the revelation that it's all a contrived revenge plot by the bad guy.
And contrived it is. The story only works by inserting endless flashbacks (full of bad pathos) and explanations. To keep the audience interested, we get gruesome scenes of murder, self-mutilation and general mayhem. As others have remarked, these scenes are well done, but serve no greater purpose. It's all a so-what comic extravaganza.
Out of 'Old Boy' I got small pleasures and a lot of disappointment, courtesy of one of the most interesting directors working today. I liked (among other things) the infamous hallway scene, the actors, the fight with the bodyguard, the revelation of the Secret and the sequence of Oh Dae-su leaving his bad self behind at the end. Small pleasures, indeed.