Oldboy

Laugh, and the world laughs with you.
Weep, and you weep alone.

Oldboy is about Oh Daesu, a man to whom we are introduced in a series of scenes in a police station. He is drunk and late for his daughter's birthday. While his friend, courteous enough to bail him out, makes a phone call, Oh Daesu disappears. He is kidnapped and imprisoned in a hotel room-like cell for fifteen years. Then he is let go without knowing why. Oldboy is about the search for why, but I've discovered that in this particular case, the search is much more important than the why.

The movie alternates evoking horror, savage satisfaction, and sweetness. We watch him harden himself in his prison, knowing that as he punches the plaster walls he is shaping himself into the instrument of his revenge. We watch in awed horror (I did, at least) as he consumes a live octopus; his desire for contact with life after his release is such that he walks into a sushi restaurant and orders "something alive." We watch, again in horror, as Daesu removes an enemy's teeth with a claw hammer.

This is not a pleasant movie.

I have a new favorite fight scene ever, though. In a one-take pan down a dimly lit squallid hallway, Daesu clobbers his way through a small army of thugs with just his trusty claw hammer at his side. It is as brutal and true as it is technically amazing. Hoodlums pile up, reluctant to be the first to get cracked. People get tired, wheezing as they circle around. Daesu's smile at the end of the fight is a little creepy, but we know how he feels.

I can say one thing for sure about this movie: if you are composing your review in your head while watching it the first time, you are going to have to scrap all your work. I thought I knew where we were going, and we ended up somewhere completely different. Don't approach this movie expecting a Kill Bill or a Count of Monte Cristo. Revenge is certainly Daesu's goal, but Oldboy takes a different tack. Daesu is challenged along the way: revenge now or truth later? Does he even really want revenge? What is the cost?

Rating: Oldboy gets three hammers and a couple pulled teeth out of four hammers.

Next up: In the Mood for Love