Image from comicvine.com
The trouble? If you’ve seen the original bloody mess (in a good way), then you have no reason to see this. Much like Gus van Sant’s remake of Psycho in 1998, 2013’s Oldboy is pretty much the same as its predecessor. That’s fine if you’re making a horror movie, maybe, or an action movie – films that can skate by with gaps in plot. But if one of the highlights of the premise is a shocking twist, then either you’re counting on your audience not having seen the original or you think it doesn’t matter even if they have. True, Chang-wook Park’s movie was in Korean with subtitles, but it had (and continues to have) a strong cult following in the U.S. as a visceral, alarming masterpiece with a truly malicious twist ending. That’s what made that movie so special. Spike Lee’s version merely copies a winning formula, but if people have an idea of what the out-of-left-field plot twist is, the impact of that twist is somewhat blunted.
Here’s a second problem. In the original, the violence is over the top camp. In the remake, it’s less over the top and more of a cheesefest. Picture this – one iconic scene in both films has our protagonist trying to escape from the evil clutches of his captors. Seemingly scores of henchmen pour out of elevators and doors, trapping our man in a hallway. In Park’s version, the bloodletting seems to be intentionally comical. In Lee’s version, it just looks comically stupid. You don’t have to slow down the DVD to notice that, while waiting their turn to attack, the thugs will jump up, down, ahead, back, to give the impression that they’re in on the action. If Lee was trying to poke fun at how a group of crooks never attacks all at once, then lack of subtlety hurts the scene; instead of a fine tweak with a wrench, we get bludgeoned with a sledgehammer.
As the movie progressed, I kept in mind the Big Twist. As I noted above, it’s still there, essentially unchanged. I’m not sure what Lee could have done to make his twist differ, even a little, from Park’s twist. Maybe there was nothing to do. In which case, my question is simple – Why remake the movie in the first place?
Brolin is really good and carries the film in some scenes. Olsen is even better here than she was in Martha Marcy May Marlene; she has a strong screen presence and more than holds her own with Brolin (and Jackson, although they have scant time together). The problem here isn’t the acting. The problem is the writing and the directing. This Oldboy is generic, lifeless, and redundant.
Oldboy: *1/2
