Release Year: 2003
Country: South Korea
Starring: Min-sik Choi, Ji-tae Yu, Hye-jeong Kang, Dae-han Ji, Dal-su Oh, Byeong-ok Kim, Seung-Shin Lee, Jin-seo Yun, Dae-yeon Lee, Kwang-rok Oh, Tae-kyung Oh, Yeon-suk Ahn, Il-han Oo.
Writer: Jo-yun Hwang and Chun-hyeong Lim
Director: Chan-wook Park
Cinematographer: Jeong-hun Jeong
Music: Yeong-wook Jo
Producer: Seung-yong Lim
Availability: Buy it from Amazon

2003, South Korea. Starring Min-sik Choi, Ji-tae Yu, Hye-jeong Kang, Dae-han Ji, Dal-su Oh. Directed by Chan-wook Park. Written by Jo-yun Hwang, Chun-hyeong Lim. Purchase from Amazon.com.

Mainstream Korean films seem dedicated to one goal above all others: to be more Hollywood than Hollywood. To be bigger, faster, more technically accomplished, more slickly produced. There is little on display in most big Korean films that isn't complete cliche, very little that could be considered in any way original. On the surface, that may sound like a criticism. But what Korean films do with genre convention and cliche, much of the time, is execute it with such astounding panache and skill that it's still remarkable despite the lack of originality. Every cliche is executed as it should be, with absolute precision and skill. Take Shiri, for instance, the film that really sparked interest in Korean cinema over here in the United States (well, that and Yongary). Shiri is a pat and predictable film from beginning to end. Nothing in it is unexpected, and no genre requirement goes unfilled. But damn, it just executes those cliches so well!

Oldboy comes to the west with a considerable amount of fanfare, having garnered awards at Cannes, as if such awards mean anything at all these days. I think at some point, every single film ever made will have won some sort of an award. Suffice it to say, there hasn't been a Korean film with this much stateside buzz surrounding it since Shiri and My Sassy Gal stormed the scene a couple years ago. And once again, what we have on our hands is a very cliche film in which everything that needs to happen does, but is presented so expertly that the end result is a hugely entertaining foray into an increasingly twisted tale of revenge. If Shiri was the Korean film industry doing the Hollywood action film several magnitudes better and more violent, then Oldboy is the same industry's response to the popularity of the genre-bending master of the sicko revenge film, Takashi Miike.

Drunken oaf Oh Dae-su (Shiri's Choi Min-sik) is bailed out of jail one night by a friend. On the way home to see his little daughter and wife after his night of carousing and doubtlessly drinking a lot of Hienekin and wrapping his tie around his head, Dae-su simply vanishes. He wakes up in a fortified hotel room, with absolutely no idea where he is, why he's there, or who is doing this to him. He is there for fifteen years until one day, the very same day he has finally completed a tunnel to the outside through his wall, he is given a new set of clothes and a fat wad of cash and simply released without any explanation whatsoever. Completely lost as to what has just happened to him, he vows to track down the people who did this to him and extract some answers by any means necessary.

It's a lean but exceptional premise for a film, indeed something that would seem right at home in a Miike or Hitchcock film, or even a Raymond Chandler novel. Oldboy possesses the same kind of quirky lack of balance that inhabits those works. It isn't long before Dae-su has managed to trace his way back to the hotel prison, and it doesn't even take that long to go fromt here to the person who paid to have him imprisoned. Oldboy's central mystery isn't who, but why. Dae-su must find out why he was imprisoned, first because the need to know is burning him up, and later because a sushi chef with whom he has struck up an awkward romantic relationship is placed under threat of death. Slowly, however, the film shifts focus even from that quest and we discover that Dae-su's revenge against his captors is secondary to the complicated revenge plot that has been hatched against him for reasons he can't understand. As he progresses from one clue, one fractured memory to the next, the revelations create an increasingly twisted and sick picture of what's happening.


Oldboy draws its strength primarily from the atmosphere. The slick direction by Chan-wook Park (JSA, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) not only result sin a gorgeous, colorful film, but it greatly augments the feeling of bewilderment and anger engulfing Dae-su. The slow move from a simple tale of revenge into territory that is truly bizarre is perfectly accomplished, once again illustrating that the best way to unsettle someone is to take a very familiar world and subtly, slowly warp it into something alien and grotesque. Oldboy does this so well that you hardly even notice that the film is getting increasingly sicker with each fragment of a clue that is recovered. Although Miike would seem to me to be the obvious inspiration for this type of film, Park's steady approach resists the gory excesses and lack of focus that identify Miike's films, which is why I feel it's apt to say Oldboy falls somewhere between Miike and Hitchock, or a particularly surreal old hardboiled detective novel. The web of ever-more perverse characters and realizations wouldn't be entirely out of place in a Raymond Chandler novel, populated as they were by pornographers, drunks, lecherous scumbags, and decadent California aristocracy. When the final pieces of Dae-su's torture snap into place, it isn't entirely unexpected -- I'd guessed what the revelation would be already -- but it's unsettling and effective regardless.

Although there is action in the film, it's hardly an action film. Having nothing better to do while locked in a hotel room for fifteen years, Dae-su decides to get into shape. One of the central elements to the overarching themes of the film is the transformation that takes place in Dae-su. When we first meet him, he's not necessarily a bad guy. He's just a useless chump. As wrong as what happens to him is, it's never the less responsible for transforming him into an entirely different type of person: physically fit, focused, determined. At the same time, we get the sense that this transformation has been engineered for him specifically so that he'll have so much more to lose when the hammer falls. His sudden explosion from being more or less entombed alive to being free means that every emotion, every feeling, every event is possessed of much greater power than would otherwise be. One of the first things he does upon obtaining his freedom is go to a sushi bar and order something, anything that is alive.

So although this is a character study more than an action film, the nature of Dae-su's heightened awareness of everything around him means that he's going to explode into fits of rage from time to time, especially when someone is standing in the way of him obtaining the next level of truth. There are a few fight scenes, and a couple particularly sadistic torture scenes that don't quite plumb the gratuitous depths of Takashi Miike at his most insane but are never the less grueling to behold. But, as with the series of increasingly twisted revelations, none of the violence seems out of place. The man has been locked up for fifteen years, after all, in solitary confinement, with no explanation as to why. He's bound to be a little frazzled, and within the context of his character, everything he does makes sense. Still, dental work performed by hammer is pretty intense.

When the hammer does fall, it's precisely because Dae-su is now focused and driven that he gets deeper and deeper into the secrets that lie behind his imprisonment and, consequently, the revelations that will conspire to destroy his present. These revelations never come across as contrived or happening simply because something needs to happen to propel the script along to its climax. The screenplay by Jo-yun Hwang and Chun-hyeong Lim is perfectly paced and presents each layer as an organic and entirely believable outgrowth of the previous, even during the end when things begin to get exceptionally complex and a little far-fetched. Within the confines of the film's internal logic, however, they make perfect sense and remain solidly believable.

The film is peppered with bits and pieces of comedy, but it never dominates the situation, and the film remains for the most part, tensely paced and hauntingly grim. It's obvious almost from the beginning that no good is going to come of anything that happens in the film, and Dae-su is a sympathetic enough character that the knowledge that this is all going to end badly for him keeps you involved in the story. The villain of the piece, Woo-jin Lee (Ji-tae Yu) is acceptably freaky, but the film relies largely on the talents of Hye-jeong Kang as cute, beleaguered sushi chef Mi-do, who finds herself thrust into Dae-su's life seemingly at random, though the viewer knows it's very unlikely that anything happening to Dae-su is happening at random. Her career is really only just beginning, but she turns in a strong performance here, matching up very well with the far more experienced and accomplished Min-sik Choi. You know bad things are probably going to happen to her as well, and you really just don't want them to.

All in all, quite a nerve-wracking though enjoyable film. I really like Park's direction in this movie. It's slick without indulging into overkill. The color palette goes for the over-saturated, ultra-rich look that is enjoying increasing popularity, a welcome change for me from all the washed-out or blue/yellow tinted films we've been suffering through the past few years. It works to make the very normal world around Dae-su seem not quite right, as if there is something off-kilter and sinister and somewhat fairytale-like about it, albeit one of those fairytales where everyone ends up cooked by witches or eaten by trolls. After watching a string of really awful Korean sci-fi films that looked beautiful but were almost impossible to watch (Yesterday and Natural City), it was nice to see another Korean film that doesn't skimp on cutting edge production but also remembers to wrap it around a compelling, intensely tragic, and haunting movie.

Labels: Action, Country: Korea, Netflix Diary, Year: 2003