With Spike Lee’s Oldboy comes the grand conclusion – one hopes – of 2013’s series of decent but pointless remakes. (See also: Carrie, Evil Dead, and arguably Much Ado About Nothing.) Lee’s interpretation of Chan-wook Park’s shocking, unforgettable thriller hits all the same beats, and hits them pretty hard. If you’ve never seen the original, you’re bound to be impressed. If you have seen the original, you’re bound to be distracted by the way in which Spike Lee screwed this up.
The new Oldboy banks on the fact that you’ve never seen the original, perhaps because you were afraid of all those threatening subtitles, or perhaps because you won’t see any movie that isn’t chock full of white people. The latter would be pretty ironic coming from Spike Lee, and I don’t buy it for a second, but either way it would be hard to look at the 2013 edition of Oldboy and not find it just a little bit condescending. If the original was so damned perfect that Lee thought it was be foolish to change (practically) anything about it, why even take the risk of screwing it up?
Or maybe they’re just trying to trick mainstream audiences into seeing this seemingly straightforward thriller about kidnapping, murder and revenge, only to watch them squirm as this new Oldboy hits the same show-stopping crescendo as the original, tearing down the borders of common decency, conventional western storytelling and any preconceived notions you may have had about the significance – or lack thereof – of interpersonal connections with both loved ones and strangers.
Or maybe someone just thought it was a good story and they wanted to take a crack at it. If so, said crack is attractively filmed, mostly well acted and has an emotionally raw center that, remake or no remake, still feels refreshing. We’re ten years out from the release of the original Oldboy, and that film remains such an iconoclastic, bombastic and shockingly meaningful display of cinematic bravado that even this by-the-numbers remake feels like a day in the sun after decades of confinement.
Which brings us to Joe Doucett, played by Josh Brolin. He’s an alcoholic absentee father who – in the middle of a self-destructive downward spiral – is kidnapped an imprisoned for 20 years, without a single living creature to talk to or any explanation as to why he’s been abducted. After the 20 years is up, he’s released back into the wilds of New York City with a challenge: figure out why he was imprisoned, and who put him there, or else his for-all-intents-and-purposes orphaned daughter will be murdered.
It’s a striking, enigmatic set-up and Spike Lee sure seems to love filming it. His style vacillates from classically cinematic to playful to even amateurish, and the effect is just as disjointed as Joe’s mindset. Played brutally and openly by Brolin, Joe is a force of nature shaded with absolute regret, and the way he both relishes and opposes human contact after spending two decades in isolation explodes with timidity and absolute, cathartic and sadistic violence.
While the rest of Oldboy Redux’s cast is mostly on board, delivering genuine and believable performances that bolster the film’s sensitive, albeit vile series of events, it unfortunately falls to Sharlto Copley to carry, or rather fail to carry the second half of the film. Although his motivations are operatic and, to those who haven’t seen the original film, unexpected, his performance is so blithely over the top that he seems to have invaded Oldboy from an entirely different cinematic universe. The contrast isn’t dramatic or intriguing, it’s just crude and silly, and robs the film’s climax in particular of its terrifying truth because said truth sounds like it’s coming from the mouth of a Fast and the Furious villain.
Oldboy is, was and probably always should be a tragedy, formed from all the little moments that mean nothing to you, but mean everything to someone you don’t give a damn about. It exposes the apocalyptic significance of every human interaction, while at the same time exposing the hypocrisy of any deeper meaning we personally place on those connections. It’s a cruel but not uncaring story that retains quite a bit of its power in Spike Lee’s version, but falls short, mostly due to a grand finale that tries simultaneously to wallow in more discomfort than ever before, and yet also take away from those events an implausible sense of hope and even some small form of tedious victory.
It’s that final, disappointing shortcoming – the failure to commit to Oldboy’s evils, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say its sick morality – that robs Lee’s version of the greatness Chan-wook Park captured in the original movie. But if you’ve never seen the original, it’s still bound to leave you exhausted, conflicted and churned… and ready to see the other, better version, which will leave you feeling even worse, and make strikingly clear how close the remake came to capturing Oldboy’s greatness, and how pointless it was – apparently – to try.
