When the credits rolled on Spike Lee's Oldboy, I looked at
my watch and was surprised to see that the film had run 15 minutes shy of two
hours. This meant that it was 15 minutes shorter than the 2003 Korean film on
which it is based, but it sure doesn't feel like it. Park Chan-wook's film was
a ludicrous revenge story that succeeded purely because of the director's stylistic
verve and the fact that he maintained an exhilarating sense of forward
momentum. He gave the audience precious little downtime in which to contemplate
how nonsensical it all was, as we were constantly being wrongfooted by the film's
outrageous twists or bravura sequences.
This new version of Oldboy lacks both that kinetic energy
and the element of surprise, and therefore it plays as a bewilderingly
half-hearted exercise in reproduction, never exhibiting any understanding of
what made the original film work. The story is basically the same, despite
early talk that it would adapt the Oldboy manga rather than the film (only
Park's film appears in the credits). Josh Brolin plays a feckless,
heavy-drinking advertising executive called Joe Doucett (a nod to the original
film's Oh Dae-su?) who is introduced to us in 1993, blowing a major business
opportunity and failing to attend his daughter's third birthday party, much to
his ex-wife's chagrin. After a boozy night, Joe awakens in an anonymous motel
room with no means of escape, and this is where he will spend the next twenty
years, at the whim of some vengeful foe, learning from his TV that he is the
prime suspect in his ex-wife's murder.
Joe's entrapment is by far the strongest part of the film.
Shooting in grainy 16mm, Lee and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt accentuate the
intensity and strangeness of his predicament, while Lee depicts the passing
years through a montage of notable news stories. Brolin's committed and haunted performance
impresses too, particularly his weary, resigned sense that he has probably
done something to deserve his extraordinary punishment – when he compiles a
list of enemies, it turns out to be a very long one indeed. The film only starts
to falter when Joe is suddenly released, twenty years later, finding himself in
a field with a phone and a wallet full of cash. This is where the machinations
of the plot begin to take over, and the film gets progressively less
interesting.
Pacing has never been Spike Lee's strongest attribute, and he is
entirely unsuited to a movie that really needs to power through its plot
points. This Oldboy is lumpy and uneven, and too much of the film's second half
feels like a film being directed by a man due to a sense of professional
obligation rather than any connection with the material. The frequent and bloody violence doesn't
possess any impact, the humour is off and the characterisation is dismal. The relationship
between Joe and Marie (Elizabeth Olsen) is required to carry a great deal of
emotional weight, but her character is so perfunctory this element of the plot is
rendered useless (to be honest, this is a bad movie for women generally), while
Samuel L. Jackson's reunion with Lee consists of some loud outfits and little
else.
Perhaps the most misguided decision the filmmakers have made is to make
Joe antagonist a preening, camp weirdo played by comically overmatched Sharlto
Copley. Again, a premise this silly needs to be sold to us with a genuine sense
of malevolence, but Copley's performance only induces giggles and bafflement.
Will anybody who reaches Oldboy's botched ending care about the plot's supposedly
shocking resolution?
Why did Spike Lee make this film? His last mainstream effort
– 2006's thoroughly enjoyable Inside Man, also his last film to get a UK cinema
release – allowed the director to bring his own sensibility to the material,
shaping it with a New Yorker's sense of perspective, humour and place, but
Oldboy isn't even set in Lee's home state. It's a terrible mismatch of
filmmaker and project, and it reaches cinemas half-baked, butchered and with no
sense of why it has been made or who it is for. It's even the first of Lee's
films to come with the credit "A Spike Lee Film" rather than "A
Spike Lee Joint," a decision he apparently made after an unhappy post-production
process in which his 140-minute version was cut down. He may as well have taken
his name off it altogether, because it's hard to detect his fingerprints
anywhere on this anonymous and unnecessary retread.