Please, please do yourself a favor and watch subtitled version of this movie. This is a terrific piece of film-making and the english dubbing will only mar its brilliance. You'll forget they're there in no time, I promise. So now that you've adjusted your audio settings properly, prepare yourself for a dark, playful, intense, and tragic (executed in a way that would make Shakespeare giddy) revenge... read more
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In the realm of revenge thrillers, you'd be hard pressed to find more ultra-violent vengeance and psycho thrills than in the creepy story of Oldboy. This Korean import made a pop splash at the Cannes Film Festival and during its limited theatrical run thanks to the imprimatur of Quentin Tarantino, who raved about it and itsO
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In the realm of revenge thrillers, you'd be hard pressed to find more ultra-violent vengeance and psycho thrills than in the creepy story of Oldboy. This Korean import made a pop splash at the Cannes Film Festival and during its limited theatrical run thanks to the imprimatur of Quentin Tarantino, who raved about it and its visionary director, Chan-wook Park, to anyone who would listen. It's easy to see why QT fell in love with the grindhouse attitude, fast-paced action, violent imagery, and icy-black humor, but it's a disservice to think of Oldboy as another Tarantino homage or knockoff. The darkly existential undercurrent in the themes that Oldboy traces over its life-long narrative arc is much more complex and deeply disturbing than anything of its kind. The movie's tagline is, "15 years of imprisonment... 5 days of vengeance." The imprisonee is Oh Dae-Su, an ordinary Joe who is snatched off a Seoul street corner and locked away in a dank, windowless fleabag hotel room for the aforementioned 15 years. Just as abruptly he is released, and thus the five days begin. Why did this happen to Oh Dae-Su? Ah, but that would be telling, and in fact we don't know ourselves until the final wrenching scenes.
Oldboy breaks into a classic three-act saga, the first of which details the hallucinatory period of imprisonment in which Oh Dae-Su wades from mild insanity to outright psychosis in the hands of unseen yet attentive captors. Act 2 is the revenge, when an entirely different tone takes over and Oh Dae-Su moves with single-minded purpose and clarity. It's this section that has gained the most notoriety, primarily for the claw-hammer dentistry scene, the one-man-army tracking shot, and the wriggling octopus that Oh Dae-Su consumes in a sushi bar (he's been dead so long he simply needs life back inside him in any way possible). In act 3, answers finally start to emerge and the sinister atmosphere grows even more profound--not without a healthy dose of extra bloodletting, of course. Oldboy is an undeniably poetic masterpiece of tension, fury, and dynamic craft. Ultimately, its epic cycle of tragedy is of the sort that mankind has been inflicting upon itself for all time. Some of the images may be gruesome, but all converge into a kind of beauty. It's in the telling of this lurid tale that these details become one and the memories of pain ultimately heal. --Ted Fry
“Please, please do yourself a favor and watch subtitled version of this movie. This is a terrific piece of film-making and the english dubbing will only mar its brilliance. You'll forget they're there in no time, I promise. So now that you've adjusted your audio settings properly, prepare yourself for a dark, playful, intense, and tragic (executed in a way that would make Shakespeare giddy) revenge story. Provided the material doesn't offend you, it's nearly impossible to find any flaws in this film. Park has proven himself to be one of today's most talented directors in his capacity to tell a story both visually and thematically. He seems capable of finding the perfect shot at any moment, no matter what the scene calls for, and with Oldboy he pulls some of the strongest performances from h” read more
NMartucci added this to a list 3 years, 3 months ago
"Plenty of people heard of this movie. Even more after the tradegy at Virgina Tech in which the media stated that this film was one of the shooters favorite movies. Idiots...
Anyways, the second film in Chan-wook Park's "revenge" trilogy is easily the best of the three. A man is kidnapped and locked in a room for 15 years and then released. Upon his release he is told he has a few days to find out who done this to him and why.
This movie is not for the weak of heart. It contains plenty of contr"
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