Oldboy

Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.

After his latest bender, obnoxious alcoholic executive Joe Doucett (Josh Brolin) awakes to find himself imprisoned in what appears to be a hotel room, with no idea why. His only companion is a TV that informs him he’s wanted for the murder of his wife. Who is behind all of this? That will be something that he’ll try to figure out over the twenty years he ultimately spends there, a purpose that eventually gives him drive to prepare himself, physically and mentally, for the storm that will follow.

Awaking in a box in the middle of a field, just as mysterious as his kidnapping, Joe follows some breadcrumbs and hunches, aided by his old friend Chucky (Michael Imperioli) and a new acquaintance, a kindly but damaged nurse, Marie (Elizabeth Olsen), with the man responsible for Joe’s troubles, The Stranger (Sharlto Copley) soon giving Joe an ultimatum – determine his identity in 46 hours and be rewarded, with evidence to clear his name, money and the continued life of his kidnapped daughter. Should he fail, he gets one of that.

And so it goes, with an investigation in the mould of classic private investigator Mike Hammer. Sorry, I mis-read that, an investigation that remoulds people with a hammer. Yes, there’s a fair amount of violence as the plot is unveiled, the details of which I shall gloss over in case you have, against all logic and reason, not watched this, or more correctly, Park Chan-wook’s 2003 film that this is a remake of. Or reinterpretation, as Lee would have it, but, well, it’s a remake.

Not a shot for shot remake, but the bones of it are much the same between the two. And, well, the biggest problem when talking about this Oldboy is not to just talk about the original Oldboy, which, as is often the case with these things, better, and did it first, making it harder to build much of a case for Lee’s version.

Let’s attempt it, anyway. It’s hard for me to judge what any impact of Lee’s small narrative modifications, would have to the first time viewer, but the original was highly compelling, and I would assume this will be too. I’ve seen the original at least three times and this version once before, so I’m perhaps past the diminishing returns point of rewatching, but even so this still held up for me.

Josh Brolin, also is excellent, Elizabeth Olsen is pretty good, and Sharlto Copley is Sharlto Copley. The actions sequences are as kinetic and crunchy as the original, and Lee’s produced as slick a big studio outing as Inside Man. Albeit one that cratered at the box office.

Which it didn’t really deserve, but I suppose the nature of a film like this is likely to appeal mainly to people who’d been watching the original for a decade, so the audience value proposition, as it tends to be for remakes, was questionable. I still rather enjoyed revisiting it, but, crucially, I’d still rather have revisited the original and, in the context of these episodes, there’s not an awful lot of Spike Lee manifested in the studio’s final cut.

From a “Spike Lee film” context, the most interesting thing about it is simply that it exists – making it seems a choice a bit out of character for him, and the results do not show the same character as his other work. An enjoyable enough footnote in his output, but perhaps one that raises more questions than it answers.