Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with another review of the brilliant and jaw-dropping OLDBOY from super-genius Chanwook Park. This one, coming from the New Zealand Film Festival, isn't too heavy on the spoilers, so if you haven't had the chance to see this flick yet don't worry about reading this one... but I will warn you that after you read you're going to want to see this movie... like right now. Fair warning!!!
Alright, pop quiz, as Dennis Hopper would say. You are kidnapped one night and locked up in a room. For 15 years you’re left there, completely shut off from the outside world. Then…you get out, to find your wife dead, your daughter gone and you are now an old man. What do you do? What do you do?
Well, it’s obvious. You get as pissed off as a eunuch in the Playboy Mansion and open a can of whup-ass on the offenders. No, not a can. A big bucket. No, a massive fuck-off truck. Maybe a shipment? I’m really not up on how whup-ass is packaged these days. But we’re talking a whole heap of profanity and excessive violence, in any case.
First tiny problem: you don’t actually know who did this to you, let alone where they are or even why they did it.
This is the situation facing Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-shik), the Old Boy. And to tell you any more about the plot would be to ruin it. This is a wild ride – no foreshadowing, no winking at the camera, just a labyrinthine plot unfolding bit by bit, with twist after twist. Not to mention all sorts of other strangeness.
DIY dentistry with a claw hammer! Drunkenness! A man eating a live octopus! Poodle suicide! Incest! Hypnosis! Suppositories! More incest! Self-tattooing! Bad hair! Really, REALLY bad hair!
It’s all there, and presented with the most bravura stylings that would make Takashi Miike stand up and applaud. One scene where Oh Dae-su, armed only with a hammer, takes on a seemingly endless hallway of assailants while the camera dollies alongside is an absolute stunning piece of filmmaking, efficiently communicating both the character’s relentless determination and the odds stacked against him in his quest for vengeance.
Director Park Chan-Wook, already acclaimed for Sympathy For Mr.Vengeance cranks things up another notch with Old Boy, a deserved winner of the grand jury prize at Cannes this year. His film is constantly stylish, even if his framing feels at times a little TOO self-conscious. Western audiences may be a little lost by the total lack of clues along the way and may even feel cheated by revelations arriving as if the scriptwriter just pulled them out of his arse at the eleventh hour.
But this would be a mistake; the audience is meant to feel as lost and confused as Oh Dae-su, as desperate to find out the truth as he is. Except maybe not to the extent of mass-murder and torture. You know, maybe.
Park Chan-Wook finds an able leading man in Choi Min-shik, who is dazzling as Oh Dae-su wavers from pathetic to defiant to loving and everything in between. It is a hell of a role, and Choi Min-shik owns every minute of it.
Old Boy is a movie that demands multiple viewings, a complex, relentless rollercoaster of a flick. Without any possibility of an argument, one of the films of the year.
