As with every remake, there’s always the potential that it could be worthwhile and find a fresh way to tell a story that has been told on-screen before. However, from the outset the project that is Spike Lee’s Oldboy was a pretty thankless one. The idea of remaking the South Korean modern classic for a Western audience was foolhardy at best and tantamount to cinematic cultural disrespect at worst. And the result of taking and twisting it to suit, let’s face it, an subtitle-phobic demographic has led to a drab, misjudged and altogether uninspired revenge thriller that retains none of what made the original so fantastic.
The film tells the story of Joe Doucett (Josh Brolin), an advertising executive and alcoholic who is one day kidnapped and imprisoned in a strange, motel-like room without explanation. He is kept in there without knowing why for 20 years with only a TV for company, along the way learning that his ex-wife has been murdered and that he is the prime suspect, leaving his daughter an orphan to be brought up by adoptive parents.
Then one day, again without apparent reason, he is set free wearing a black suit, given a mobile phone and some money. He soon meets Marie Sebastian (Elizabeth Olsen), a nurse who offers to help him. While working from a list of possible enemies that could have imprisoned him he is confronted by the culprit, The Stranger (Sharlto Copley), who makes him an interesting proposition that could lead to him finding out the reason behind what happened to him.
Let’s get the elephant/squid in the room out of way: this remake is an absolute shadow of the original. It’s hard to talk about it without thinking of Park Chan-wook’s masterful revenge tale – the film itself makes no bones about the fact it’s a remake, stating as much in the opening credits – and the film is in a lose-lose situation when it comes to Westernising the story. Any attempts to hint at the 2003 film, such as the famous squid-eating scene or single-shot corridor fight, only seek to remind you how woeful this is in comparison. And as a revenge thriller taken and judged on its own terms it falls way short of the mark, free of any palpable urgency, suspense or mystery but rather achieving a sense of going through the motions.
Quite apart from the fact that the further it delves into the reasons behind what’s happening to Joe the less it makes sense for a Western audience (the title along presents problems), it’s never confident enough with the story and keeps moving forward in fits and starts, mistaking slow scenes with little or no dialogue for character or emotional depth. The screenplay, by I Am Legend and Thor screenwriter Mark Protosevich, is at once overly convoluted and disappointingly simplified in how it handles the main themes of this story. It almost seems shy of many of those ideas, only hinting but never committing to them, all the while banging you over the head with unnecessary exposition; at one point Joe’s friend Chucky (Michael Imperioli) actually says something to the effect of, “Who would wanna do something like this to you?” in a moment equivalent to Basil Exposition explaining time travel to the audience in Austin Powers.
Brolin does what he can with the lead role and provides any of the emotion the film manages to scrape together by the end but he’s ill-served by a screenplay that turns him into a superhero about two thirds of the way through instead of the broken man doing bad things the character is originally supposed to be. Olsen plays a vitally important character but she feels miscast and too bland to make the sort of impact needed.
It also suffers from what has to be one of the worst cinematic villains this side of Robert De Niro in The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle. Played by the otherwise talented Sharlto Copley, his terrible (I guess it’s supposed to be…) English accent and body disfigurement makes him seem ripped straight from a third rate beat ’em up video game or some reject from a Bond villain fancy dress party. He’s supposed to be menacing and mysterious but he’s so campy, over-the-top and all around ridiculous that it rips any possibility of that away. Similarly hamming up the screen is a bizarrely dressed Samuel L. Jackson, complete with a blonde mohawk and waistcoat, playing the man in charge of maintaining the jail-like facility.
Once the film trudges through its heavy-handed plot mechanics it gets to a revelation that should, as a viewer, shock you to the core. It’s quite an achievement, then, that it comes and goes without great effect, almost as an afterthought. This is undoubtedly down to the fact that the film hasn’t built up enough intrigue or made you care enough about the central character(s) for it to have the intended impact.
Spike Lee’s Oldboy is a pointless remake if ever there was one. Beyond the idea of opening up the story to audiences who (sadly) just won’t watch films with subtitles, it’s tough to see what he has brought to the table or added to the conversation, as much as you squint your eyes and scratch your brain through the half-hearted, lukewarm proceedings. The visual inventiveness and moral complexity of the original is swapped for a frequently brutish, often tasteless and ultimately dull revenge film that seems to enjoy the squalor of its violence rather than examine its futility, all of which leads to an ending that lacks catharsis and simply leaves you wondering why.
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