Oldboy (2003)
Laugh and the world laughs with you - weep and you weep alone.
THE SUMMARY: A guy gets kidnapped and imprisoned by another guy for outing him as an incestuous weirdo, only to be duped into becoming an incestuous weirdo himself. As my wife described, Oldboy is a like a terrible Quentin Terantino-Wes Anderson mashup. It’s torture porn. It’s actual porn. The aesthetic is gaudy, and worst of all, you have to read it. Please - have mercy and take that hammer and tongue-scissors to my eyes.
FROM MOVIE-PICKER DEEPERKING: Iconic action and revenge mystery. The thought of being trapped in a room without knowing why, and without knowing how long you'd be in there is intriguing enough to imagine, but that's only a starting point. This film goes to extremes that give you a visceral reaction. The remake isn't bad, but this original is mind-blowing.
JAMIE AND JEANNE’S AI FACESWAP ART:
At least we didn’t have to watch this sex scene.
This dad would have made other choices.
If Blonde was an Asian Joker.
I would rather actually eat the octopus than watch this movie again.
THE BEST:
There’s a mystery, I guess: I’ll admit, I didn’t see ‘guy is banging his daughter and seeks to resume banging his daughter’ as the end. Nor did I see ‘guy tried to bang his sister and this guy saw it’ as the reason for the mysterious 15-year prison sentence. But just because a story isn’t predictable doesn’t mean it’s good. There are terrible surprises too, and seeing a whole movie devoted to two guys trying to cover their incest tracks certainly qualifies.
There’s ‘revenge,’ I guess: Everyone likes revenge, and ostensibly this movie is about it, though I just don’t understand how or for whom. Lee Woo-jin - the guy who set all this nonsense up because of this sister lust - he gets his ‘revenge’ by duping Oh Dae-su into plowing his daughter, but then he just kills himself. So it’s hard to see how he wins any revenge.
Likewise, Oh Dae-su gets his ‘revenge’ by unraveling Woo-jin’s plot and winning the challenge to get him to kill himself, but at the cost of accidentally becoming an incest dad who decides to keep being an incest dad because he actually really likes it. No win there either.
Revenge is supposed to be satisfying. Oldboy isn’t. At all. It’s just gross and bizarre.
Woo-jin tricks Dae-su into realizing that incest is awesome.
THE WORST:
It’s just torture porn: The teeth-pulling. The tongue-cutting. The octopus-eating. The several suicides or attempted suicides. It’s just torturous for the sake of being torturous. None of these points actually add much to the story. They’re just hard to watch, ironically making the viewer squirm exactly like that octopus. If your movie compels me to look away, it sucks.
And some actual porn: The sex scene is as close to pornography as I’ve seen in a movie. It’s way too long, and way too detailed. Whatever happened to some tasteful subtlety to demonstrate a relationship’s consummation, and then moving on? In this case, I have to watch graphic boning, awkward conversation during the boning, and then later learn it’s actually father-daughter boning too. I can’t believe it - I’ve actually found a sex scene worse than Top Gun’s.
Point demonstrated, it appears the only place I can link the scene is on actual porn sites. But no, I won’t.
The combat is just plain retarded: He’s a former drunk, locked up in a mysterious hotel room prison cell for 15 years, and becomes the world’s greatest fighter from punching a wall? The hammer fight scene that’s supposed to be some standout is just stupid. ‘Quick! Everyone! Attack him one at a time, in sequence!’ One of the worst examples of that meme I’ve ever seen. In this situation, Dae-su maybe gets a good hammer hit on a guy or two, before the gang mob-swarms him and stomps his face so badly his tongue is no longer accessible to be severed anyway.
WTF is the point?: I have no idea what lesson I’m supposed to learn, or what point I’m supposed to take away from this movie. Don’t try to bang your sister, or else you might have to dupe a guy into banging his daughter? Don’t spy on your friends, because you might see one browsing under his sister’s dress and he’ll capture you in a bizarre scheme to make you plow your family too? Don’t bang your daughter, or you might like it and hypnotize yourself into forgetting she’s your daughter so you can continue?
That’s exactly how the movie ends - instead of helping his daughter out of this horrible scenario, Dae-su withholds the information from her, and figures out how to make himself forget the knowledge so he can continue in the abuse. Thanks, dad. Way to protect your kid.
The actual point, as far as I gather, is just to be a weird sick f**k under the guise of being ‘artful.’ This is the modern art of cinema. Throwing paint at a wall doesn’t make you skilled, and neither does the deployment of ‘edgy’ topics or themes without anything meaningful behind them. The story sucks, and ironically, there aren’t any hammers to fix that.
Just f**k off with the teeth stuff.
Have you guys ever considered beating his ass... together?!
THE RATING: 1/5 Wickies, and that’s generous. I would actually rather watch Blade Runner. At least it has some interesting moral concepts. What is this movie’s? Should I hack out my tongue so I can keep f**king my daughter in peace? No… no to all pieces of that preposterous dilemma. Forget Oldboy - I want my Oldlife back, before I had never heard of this trash.
Note: this is my first one-Wicky rating of 2024. I almost made it half the year. The last one-Wicky I reviewed was Spaceballs in September.
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NEXT WEEK: Frailty (2001)
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