Spike Lee's remake of Park Chan-wook's South Korean cult classic feels like it's violently treading water, says Tom Shone. Oldboy is out in the US this Friday and is released in the UK on Friday 6 December
Spike Lee's Oldboy is as far from a Spike Lee Joint as could be imagined. It's actually a Park Chan-wook Joint — a remake of his 2003 South Korean cult classic about a man held in solitary confinement for 15 years before being loosed to wreak vengeance on his captors. Adapted from a manga comic-book, which was in turn adapted from an overwhelming desire to see what damage hammers do to foreheads, Chan-wook's film was a matt-black vengeance riff, decked out in playful camera angles, sicko violence, and one live octopus, which its hero ate, still wriggling – although I like to think that afterwards, its cameo over, the octopus simply called "Cut!" and resumed its position behind the camera.
What drew the director of Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X and Clockers to resolving this Rubik's cube is anyone's guess. In Lee's version, Josh Brolin plays Joe Doucette, a two-bit ad exec who wakes up after an alcoholic bender in a motel room, and remains locked up there for the next 20 years. He has no idea who his captors are, only that they feed him a thoughtful tray of dim-sum and vodka every day, and pay the cable bills on time, so that Joe can watch his wife's murder being pinned on him in his absence, a succession of presidents being sworn in, and — as luck would have it — a series of martial arts programmes. These come in very handy when, one day, he wakes up in a field sporting a new buzzcut, a newly toned body, an iPhone and a headful of vengeance. Game on.
Quite literally. Like Chan-wook's original, Lee's film, with its vivid rendings of the flesh — by box cutter and hammer — and challenge-level plotting, has the maziness of a video game. Joe's tormentor (Sharlto Copley) is with him every step of the way, helpfully phoning in clues and questions that will enable him to solve the mystery — "Who I am and why did I imprison you?" — even throwing in an extra hostage for "a little added motivation," when the plot needs a freshener. And if that sounds to you suspiciously like a screenwriter outsourcing his dramatic duties to his villain, then give yourself a gold star. I grew tired of these ex machina bad guys, with their chummy phone manner and tedious riddles around the time they first appeared: it's been downhill since Speed, basically.
Oldboy is lively but numb — checked out, as if Lee were directing it following a period of intense convalescence. In a way, he has. It's been a tough few years for the filmmaker, during which he has struggled to get films made, while his two most recent movies — Miracle at St Anna (2008) and Red Hook Summer (2012) — have struggled to break even. Perhaps the best way of looking at Oldboy is as a piece of placeholder cinema, like Martin Scorsese's After Hours: a chance for the filmmaker, after a period of attrition, to get a small hit under his belt, a workout to show off his camera angles and get the blood flowing again.
As such: mission accomplished. Lee's motor skills are fine, as is his viewfinder. Determined to outdo Chan-wook's most famous sequence, showing his hero's progress down a corridor filled with violent gang-members, Lee restages the same fight with four gangs, on four different levels of a parking garage, this time viewed aerially, making up in scale what he loses in claustrophobia. I missed the octopus — it shows up here confined to a tank, which Brolin gives a nice do-I-know-you double take — but I loved the drunken POV shots as Brolin staggers, bellowing, from bar to bar at the movie's start. What substance the film has in its first 20 minutes comes from its recovery subtext, given flesh and sinew by Brolin, who puts on a spectacular show of a man coming centrifugally apart. Locked in that motel room, quaffing down quarts of vodka, we have no need of an answer as to why he's there. His imprisonment has its own warped poetry.
Also on hand is Elizabeth Olsen as the social worker who takes this wounded brute under her wing — in another film, their beauty-and-the beast romance might have had more to it, but here she's just more meat for the grinder. I winced at the sight of this soulful, moon-faced actress, bent double in her knickers, being called a "bitch" by a Mohican-wearing torturer played by Samuel L Jackson. If anything, Lee's attempts to inject some soul into the material only makes it clear just how rooted in adolescence it really is. The timing of this film seems both unfortunate and salutary. In this banner year for black film-makers, taking on subjects as great as slavery and the civil rights movement, here comes Spike Lee, without whose example none of their films would exist in quite the form they do, and what has he got for us? Some karate moves, fancy camerawork, and a wink-wink cameo for a cephalopod.
It may be time for the pupils to reinvigorate their master. The film that eventually followed After Hours? Goodfellas.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/27/oldboy-spike-lee-first-look-review
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