Cover Art

Credits

Director: Chan-wook Park Starring: Choi Min-Sik, Ji-tae Yu, Hye-jeong Kang, Dae-han Ji Screenplay: Jo-yun Hwang, Chun-hyeong Lim, Chan-wook Park Country: South Korea

The film's beginning is a bit disjointed, introducing the drunk and disorderly Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik of The Quiet Family). He gets arrested, gets bailed, and then the film cuts to him detained in what looks like a grotty studio flat. This is not a standard prison, as he gets gassed, tested on, fed the same meal everyday, and doesn't even know why he's being held or how long he'll be kept. He spends 15 years in the prison, trying to figure out why he was taken. Naturally, he goes a bit crazy.

Oh Dae-su has to rely on TV for human "contact" and as a time keeping device. From the tele he learns that his wife had been murdered and he was blamed for her death. As the years pass, his anger grows, and he trains himself to fight. When he is finally set free, he tries to learn why he was captured and confined.

Oldboy has a nice, deliberate pace, but is unfortunately a bit overlong. The film needed to lose about 10 minutes, but the strong imagery helps prevent the movie from becoming too cumbersome even during the final minutes. The cinematography is great, making excellent use of camera angles and the widescreen format. I particularly enjoyed a split screen section which showed the passage of time in Oh Dae-su's prison against events on television, creating a media timeline. A hallway fight, shot in one take and requiring three days of filming to get right, will undoubtedly be the highlight for many cineophiles, but I found the scene's choreography a little too weak to be overly impressed. Oldboy has a few other things like live octopus consumption and a nasty scene involving a hammer that will get people talking, but I think the most disturbing image comes very early on and involves a yuckily placed ant.

I was glad to see Yu Ji-Tae on hand as the bad guy. Yu is in two of my favourite Korean films, Attack the Gas Station! and Nightmare, and is particularly good in the later. He is also in the dreadful Natural City (the only film I've ever walked out on in a cinema), but I'll forgive him that egregious mistake. Unfortunately, I didn't find Yu's master plan hard to unravel at all, which meant I had to take Oldboy as a purely visual experience.