A family thing

Rating: 6/10 (23 December 2015)

Oddly having seen the Spike Lee Americanized remake first, I preferred the critically lambasted Oldboy slightly more than the Korean original. Talk about going out on a limb.
Oh Dea-Su goes out drinking on his daughter's birthday and finds himself imprisoned in a room for 15 years. He is also suspected of killing his wife. He has no idea who has captured him and for what reason.
15 years on he is released and given just five days to discover the identity and reason of the man who imprisoned him. Oh Dae-Su sees this as a chance of getting revenge, he has kept himself in shape while he was locked up and goes out looking for answers, he also falls in love with a young woman along the way.
The film is a Gothic revenge tale with graphic violence and a nod to The Count of Monte Cristo and Oedipus Rex.
It seems that Oh Dea-Su's nemesis has set up a complex and contrived form of revenge that spans years. Like Oh Dea-Su you yearn for the answers and you root for him as he beats up all-comers some literally to a pulp.
However I found the ending to be messy and unnecessarily graphic and gruesome. The remake had an elegant ending which was more palatable. Also I found the lead actor hard to take as a bad ass.
Josh Brolin in the remake I could buy as the rowdy student in his youth or the drunken boor as a young man. When he is released I can see him being grungy and violent as he hunts down the people who locked him up.
Still Oldboy was critically lauded and regarded as a masterpiece of modern South Korean cinema and is worth a watch.