Review of Oldboy (2003) by Jacob M — 22 Feb 2013

From the opening scene you are pulled in to the movie and your mind is not released until well after it is over. In the opening of this movie Oh Dae-Su (our hero) is gripping on the tie of a man trying to commit suicide. You don't know why or what is going on, you just find yourself thrown into this world headfirst having to figure all of this out. It really starts out with a bang and from then on there is not a single moment that is boring. That is one of the many great things about this movie and the list goes on forever. Now there are spoilers in this review and if you want to see this movie, I highly recommend you don't read this.

As I said before, it begins with an action scene of Oh Dae-Su grabbing the tie of a man trying to commit suicide. Then it cuts to Oh Dae-Su drunk in a police station. He is babbling on about nonsense and then his friend comes in and bails him out. They are walking down the street to a phone booth where they stop to give Oh Dae-Su's wife a call. When Oh Dae-Su is done talking to his wife and his daughter to tell her about her birthday gift, which is a pair of angel wings, he steps out of the booth while his friend begins to talk to the family, but when his friend comes out, Oh Dae-Su is gone.

Oh Dae-Su finds himself locked in a prison that oddly resembles a hotel room. He doesn't know why he's in there or for how long and all he can do is wait. This whole part in the cell is really cool. So he's locked in there for fifteen years and all he has is his TV and his thoughts. He at one point begins to write the names of every person he had ever done wrong to try to find out who may have imprisoned him; he fills up around four journals. He says that he had thought he had lived a normal life, but realizes that he has committed a lot of sins; one of the many good points in this movie. I bet if you looked back on the things you've done wrong, you'll find a lot. This stuff is great and the other really interesting thing he says is, "if they had told me it was going to be fifteen years, would it have been easier to endure?" Would it have been? This is really cool. So he is in this cell for fifteen years, pretty much losing his mind. He begins to hallucinate and he grows a deep connection to his TV. Then after the fifteen years are up, he's suddenly let out.

That's where we get to where we came in. Oh Dae-Su is gripping onto a man's necktie to save him from committing suicide so he can tell him his story and see if he knows anything about his imprisonment. Well, he doesn't and he commits suicide anyway. So Oh Dae-Su is literally thrown back into the world after not seeing a human being for fifteen years. He literally goes crazy when he sees a REAL woman. Well, he goes to this restaurant where he meets Mido after eating a live octopus and passing out. Mido takes him home and they begin to fall in love. Cute, isn't it? Well, not for long.

While Oh Dae-Su was imprisoned he was fed the same thing every day for the whole fifteen years; dumplings from some restaurant. He will never forget that taste. So he starts to go to every restaurant in the city with Mido and orders their dumplings until he finds the same ones he had before for fifteen years. Well, he finds them and he follows a delivery guy to the prison and he interrogates a guy by pulling each of his teeth with the claw end of a hammer until he gets his answers. This is a scene that makes me cringe. There are a lot of them in this movie and this is one of them. You get to see the tooth being twisted and pulled and the blood and, ugh. It's disgusting. But this leads to the coolest scene in the movie. After he pulls the guys teeth, the guy gets his goons to fight Oh Dae-Su and try to take him out, but actually, did you know that fifteen years of imaginary training, can be put to use. He just starts to fight off 50 guys and he wins, even after getting a knife in his back. This scene is really cool. It's shot extremely well and it is choreographed phenomenally. Alright, I'll break it down. So what happened was the goons began to try to fight Oh Dae-Su and he fights them, but they film this fight scene almost like a video game. The camera is horizontal to Oh Dae-Su and it just moves back and forth with Oh Dae-Su as he fights these people. It looks very flat and really cool and to top it all off, it's done in one take. This solidifies that this movie is incredible. This is impressive.

So after this Oh Dae-Su comes back to Mido's home to see that she had a little run in with some goons. Mido is pretty spooked and she then gives Oh Dae-Su the permission to seduce her. Then after they do it we figure out why the villain (the person who imprisoned Oh Dae-Su) is so angry. What happened was that Oh Dae-Su had started a rumor that the villain and his sister made love and one thing led to another and the rumor changed to a rumor where everyone thought that the sister was pregnant. So the sister develops a fake pregnancy and she kills herself by jumping off of a dam. This is why the villain had imprisoned our hero.

After this Oh Dae-Su confronts the villain and they talk for a little bit and then the villain tells Oh Dae-Su that he has a gift for him. He points over to a purple box and Oh Dae-Su opens it and this is where the twist kicks in so big Spoiler Alert here. Well, Oh Dae-Su opens up the box and there is a photo album in it and its all pictures of his daughter since she was four. He begins to flip through it, the music swells, and Oh Dae-Su becomes more frantic and frantic as he goes along. He flips to the end and he then sees a picture of Mido. Mido is his daughter. He banged his own daughter. So Oh Dae-Su didn't get his revenge at all, the villain did. The villain won. This is a really cool scene. The build up for it is incredible. It really entraps you in that moment and it's awesome. Also this reveal is so powerful because you thought at the beginning of the movie that Oh Dae-Su would get his revenge, but he doesn't, his life is ruined even more. The villain wins and Oh Dae-Su has a mental breakdown. He starts to plead to the villain and kiss his shoes and bark like a dog to get the villain to forgive him so he won't tell Mido about this and ruin her life. This next part is another scene that makes me cringe and it's where Oh Dae-Su cuts off his tongue to make the point that he learned his lesson and will never speak again. Well, the villain has had enough and he leaves Oh Dae-Su be. He got his revenge, but also that's why he has nothing else to live for so he shoots himself in the head. That was the only thing he wanted and there's nothing else to fulfill. His life has no more meaning.

So after this Mido runs in and hugs Oh Dae-Su and tells him she loves him and takes him back home. They run off together and later Oh Dae-Su gets hypnotized and gets himself to forget everything about Mido being his daughter. Well, that's Oldboy.

So isn't it nice to know that in the end there is sort of a happy ending. After this gloomy and dark thrill ride I think so. Oldboy is a complex and gruesome look at the beauty and the ugliness of revenge and its effect on the human psyche. "Revenge is good for your health, but pain will find you again." This movie is interesting in that way and is a very fulfilling first installment in the revenge trilogy. The acting is great. Oh Dae-Su did a fantastic job and Mido did a good job too (although her voice is a bit annoying). The writing is epic with the awesome one liners and voice over hasn't been that great since Fight Club. The directing was phenomenally done and beautifully handled. Extremely impressive, a lot like Fight Club. This movie reminded me a lot of Fight Club. The visuals looked a lot alike and it had some of the same dark underlying themes. In all, I thought this was an amazing movie and it succeeded on every level. I am really looking forward to the remake coming out later this year (hopefully Spike Lee knows what he's doing). A cult classic and I'll go to the extent of saying it's a masterpiece.