Like "Sin City" and the "Kill Bill" movies, "Oldboy" is an exercise in brutality.
This 2003 revenge-thriller from South Korea, just released in the United States, features scenes of people being assaulted and tortured with hammers, live animals being eaten, and teeth, fingers and body parts being removed or hacked off — and that's just the start of things.
Here's yet another film that begs the question of what it takes to get an NC-17 rating from the MPAA these days.
That being said, parts of the movie are luridly enthralling, and its ugliness is strangely appealing (at least to people with a high tolerance for such things). Yet it pushes too many buttons and is filled with so many false endings that eventually it becomes tiresome.
The title refers to Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), a businessman who's recovering from a drunken rampage when he's apparently kidnapped.
Dae-su wakes up to find that he's being held captive in a dingy hotel room or apartment. And there he stays for 15 years, until he's given new clothes, money and a cellular phone and is sent on his way.
And while he mulls the reasons for his sudden release, Dae-su meets Mido (Kang Hye-jeong), a young sushi chef who takes pity on the still-disoriented man and agrees to shelter him.
It appears the person behind his kidnapping and imprisonment has further plans for him — that his nightmare is not over.
The film seems ready to end several times. What's worse, the ending that filmmaker Park Chan-wook settles for is the worst of the various options. (Let's hope they correct that for the American remake, which is already in development.)
What nearly saves the film, though, is the action. In one of the best and certainly most effective scenes, Dae-su takes on a pack of men, armed only with a hammer. (At least some of the credit should go to cinematographer Jeong Jeong-hun for the inventive way the sequence is shot.)
"Oldboy" is rated R for strong scenes of action violence (including gunplay, brawling, beatings, violence against women and self-mutilation), graphic gore, occasional use of strong sexual profanity and other graphic sexual talk, drug content (use of tranquilizers and a hypodermic needle), graphic simulated sex, multiple scenes of torture and male and female nudity. Running time: 119 minutes.
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