"Even though I'm no more than a monster - don't I, too, have the right to live?"
Okay, so I'm a huge sucker for revenge-flicks. The whole idea of all-consuming lust for vengeance is very fascinating to me, and I find it strangely poetic that a basic human emotion, like the desire for revenge, has the ability completely ingulf someone and turn them into another person entirely. Kill Bill Vol. 2 and Gladiator are two of my personal favourite revenge-flicks, and even though I'd heard from numerous sources that the Korean movie Oldboy was supposed to to outclass them both, it took me over a year to actually sit down and give it a go.
Oldboy is the second part of Chan-wook Park's revenge trilogy, and it came out in 2003 to huge critical acclaim. The story of of the movie is about Dae-su Oh, a drunken lowlife from the streets of Seul, who for reasons completely unknown to him and his family, is taken prisoner for fifteen years. During his time in confinement, Dae-su realises how many sins he has committed in his life, and he promises himself that he'll straighten out and become a good person, as soon as he finds a way to escape. He has an indescribable thirst for revenge as well though, and whilst trying to come up with an escape plan, Dae-su stars training his body in his prison cell. When he's finally released after fifteen years of beating up walls and furniture, he's become an incredibly apt kung-fu fighter, and he decides to use his new strength to track down and kill the people responsible for keeping him in confinement, before beginning a new life as a normal citizen. Things don't turn out exactly the way Dae-su planned though, and as he stumbles through the moonlit streets of Seul, a long forgotten secret of enormous proportions begins to unravel in front of him.
First of all, I want to make one thing completely clear: This movie is nuts. Absolutely, undeniably, 100 % positively crazy. It's not a typical movie by any standards whatsoever, and I'm convinced that 99 % of all Europeans and Americans will find it indescribably foreign in its narrative style. A lot of this lies in the technical details of how Oldboy is shot, composed and edited; things I'll go more in depth with later, but the narrative and the plot is the biggest and most important difference between this film and the ones I'm used to watching. Oldboy is Based on a manga; a fact that's very easily recognisable when you take a look at the story of the movie, and especially the dialogue and the inner narration of the main characters seem like something that could have been taking directly out of an Asian comic book. I didn't hate this manga-element as much as I can imagine a lot of western people would upon their first viewing, but then again, I didn't love it either. The rather corny inner monologues about destiny, honor and humiliation felt a little unconvincing and perplexing at times, but on the other hand, there were times at which they worked perfectly and added a lot of suspense and a few laughs to the narrative as well. Oldboy is not the most severe case of weird Asian film making I've ever seen, but keep in mind that it definitely isn't your usual Hollywood revenge flick either.
Performance wise, Oldboy is one of the best foreign movies I've seen to date. Min-sik Choi delivers an incredibly real and vulnerable performance as Dae-su, and especially the way he's able to manipulate his facial expressions from scene to scene had me raising my eyebrows in disbelief. You truly believe that this guy spend fifteen years behind bars, because of the way his eyes go from being lively and desperate to cold and hateful as time goes by, and even though Min-sik obviously didn't spend that many years in confinement, his remarkable ability to transform his physical appearance makes you question whether or not he actually did. The villain of this movie, Woo-jin Lee, played by Ji-tae Yu, is another truly remarkable character, who is as deeply wounded and as troubled as our main character is. The back and forth dialogue between the two of them is incredible to say the least, and I was completely taken aback by the impact that both of them added to the film. You don't come across a movie in which the antagonist is just as deeply fleshed out and just as important to the over all story as the protagonist is, but when you do, the result tends to be rather breathtaking. One very specific plot device comes to mind when I think about the chemistry between the two main characters, and had their connection not been as convincing and as powerful as it is, the plot device to which I'm referring would not have been nearly as impactful or as jaw dropping as it is. The whole revenge-angle literally multiplies in proportion during this event, and trust me when I say that it's one of the most beautiful strokes of screen writing you'll ever witness.
As someone who's eternally fascinated by screenwriting and storytelling in general, the experience of watching Oldboy was absolutely thrilling. The plot is the absolute star of this movie, at least in my opinion, and there were so many times during this story where I found myself thinking something along the lines of "man, if only I had the imagination that these filmmakers have", or "I'd give almost anything to be able to write a script like that", one of them being during the scene I talked about a minute ago. The plot takes a countless amount of other unpredictable twists and turns throughout the course of the movie as well, and even though the story is being told in a very snappy and very up-beat kind of way, keeping track of the things that are going on isn't hard at all. The fact that the last 45 minutes of Oldboy is some of the most intense, shocking, outrageous and poetic storytelling I've ever seen pretty much solidifies its status as one of the most well written movies I've laid my eyes upon in quite some time too.
Seeing as this is a revenge-based movie, a little bit of violence is bound to take place somewhere down the line. Actually, let me rephrase that; a busload of bloody, gory, ultra violent mayhem is bound to take place. And it does. I won't go into too much detail about the specific acts of violent behaviour that takes place during this film, mainly because of how determining and important they are to the actual plot and the character progression. I've rarely seen a thing like this happen before, but in the case of Oldboy, torture, killing, destruction and dismembering is an absolutely vital element of the story, and the movie simply wouldn't be the same without it. I mean for Christ's sake, it's a movie about death, revenge, sin, captivity and regret, so please don't get too offended when people suddenly start pulling each other's teeth out with hammers. Oh, and by the way, if you do decide to watch this movie, be prepared to witness the best fight scene in movie history about half way through the film.
On a technical level, Oldboy is in a class of its own as well. The musical score is haunting and unforgettable, the camera work is beautiful and weirdly artistic, and even the choreography of the many fist fights is near flawless. On top of that, Min-sik managed to go through his endless amounts of physically exhausting scenes almost without the use of a stunt-man or a double, further solidifying his work in this film as something extraordinary. It's hard for me to not to give this exiting, well written, beautifully acted, poetic, gorgeously looking, haunting, enthralling and thought provoking piece of top notch entertainment the rating of movie magic, but as I mentioned in the beginning of the review, a few of the plot points and conversations did feel a little too bloated and cheesy for my taste. Oldboy is still an extremely god movie though, and it's final revelation definitely is the single most disturbing shocker I've experienced in cinema. I'll most definitely be buying it on BluRay, and I strongly recommend anyone who doesn't mind violent content and foreign languages to do the same. (5/6)
Oldboy IMDb link here
Oldboy trailer here
No comments:
Post a Comment