One for the kiddies and your intellect

Rating: 8/10 (5 December 2004)

Once you've seen this, you're going to be thinking about it for a while.
No, you won't simply be unable to forget it because it's unpleasant and blowtorches itself onto your memory; it's the thematic and character implications that remain memorable.
The film's premise is well known: Dae-su Oh is a philandering businessman and irresponsible father. Basically an a**hole, he has the rug pulled out from underneath him when, one rainy night, he's abducted and imprisoned in a private jail: no cause or authority given. Finding himself alone in a dingy room, and enjoying no human contact save dodgy food, kicks and gassing from his anonymous captors, Dae-su Oh starts to grow (unsurprisingly) unhinged.
Who did this to me? AND WHY? WHY? WHY? And Dae-su Oh gets plenty of time to ponder that question, because he is caged for some 15 years. During the interim, he has nothing save for the TV and some pads of paper for company. From the telly, he sees he is the prime suspect in wife and child's murders, and is now a wanted man. A seething bundle of psychosis by this stage, he begins to practice boxing, using the wall (yes, the wall) as a punch-bag, tutored by a TV sports programme. It Bart and Lisa from The Simpsons watched what he watches, one dreads to think
But then, Dae-su Oh is suddenly released, no reason given for this sudden ejection. Then, his nemesis gives him a wodge of cash, a mobile phone, a suit and a three days to find out WHY he was kept locked up. And Dae-su Oh is going to find out.
Chan Wook-Park's film has courted plenty of controversy on account of its graphic, almost comic-book style brutality, as Dae-su Oh beats his way through a long list of suspects. One seen in particular, when the exhausted Dae-su Oh scoffs a live squid in a sushi bar, has generated condemnation (personally, it's his table manners that offended me).
To get the most out Oldboy, you have shed any preconceptions and fears: take the plunge into one of the most twisted situations imaginable. Park quite literally turns the world upside down for Dae-su Oh, and I think his greatest achievement here is that the audience is likely to feel just as stricken and abused. Constantly the boundaries of your taste and integrity are confronted. Aside from the violence that Dae-su Oh wrecks, hungering for retribution, Park throws in a number of gut-wrenching situations that are intensely personal for the characters and for us as well. Oldboy is a film that has its head in the clouds and feet of the ground. Put simply: Park keeps this horribly, oddly easily to believe, because character generates incident.
However, I read in an interview that Park apparently comes up with his film plots in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. It shows. Though hard to explain, Oldboy is not a homogeneous work. The narrative is sprawling and visual style, while frequently amazing, messy. Oldboy tends to ramble.
Worse, this is never as devastating as Park's second film Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance. It's as though Park took the flabby, humanist message from JSA and injected it into the disturbing premise of SFMV. Park tries to do too much in Oldboy, trying to marry thriller and complicated story and even moments of laugh-out-loud comedy, and it doesn't hang together.
Thus we are left with a bunch of moments, which are by turns repellent, monstrous, devastating, funny, upsetting and touching. Oldboy has one cohesive element, though: improvised weapons and torture methods. Toothbrushes, knives (classic), scissors, claw-hammer etc.
But I recommend you watch Oldboy. In the third act Park conjures up several amazing scenes that reveal the origins the animosity has led someone to exact a monstrous revenge against Dae-su Oh. If light is shed on the story, then the mental turmoil and confusion remain, best conveyed in a brilliant, Escher-like sequence.
Oldboy will stick with you. I won't and can't try to explain what's it really about and what it means, but any and all who see it will experience something different.
And to end this review, I'll say the climax presents a moment that is the epitome of human degradation and pain.