![]() ![]() 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. Lee's motor skills are fine, as is his viewfinder. 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.Īs such: mission accomplished. 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. Oldboy is lively but numb - checked out, as if Lee were directing it following a period of intense convalescence. 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. And if that sounds to you suspiciously like a screenwriter outsourcing his dramatic duties to his villain, then give yourself a gold star. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. What drew the director of Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X and Clockers to resolving this Rubik's cube is anyone's guess.
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