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PLOT: A drunken Korean businessman is kidnapped and kept for 15 years in a "cell" that resembles a cheap hotel room with only TV for company and meals delivered through a slot. Finally, he is inexplicably set free and, fueled by revenge, he sets out to unearth the reason for his captivity.
The mindbending Korean revenge fantasy Oldboy evokes so many classic moments of cinematic excess that you'd almost think it was an exercise in one-upmanship.
To wit: An elaborate and disturbing incest subplot that makes Chinatown's look linear, a dentistry torture scene that makes Marathon Man look tame, a bloody tongue-slicing, and any number of evocations of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill.
There are also -- and I don't remember seeing these before -- a controversial live-octopus lunch scene, a bloody hammer-fight and... well, let's stop there before we're accused of spoilerism.
Director Chan-wook Park is one of a young school of Korean auteurs engaged in fairly explicit filmmaking, inspired by what they see as the underlying violence and sexual dysfunction of contemporary Korea (see also the review of Bad Guy by Kim Ki-Duk in these pages). These kimchee Scorseses are clearly not bound by the current Puritanical standard of North American movie-making, and can be as "out there" in realizing their feverish nightmares as early David Lynch.
Park's Oldboy is a hypercharged paranoid fantasy that begins with a night on the town by a Seoul businessman named Dae-Su Oh (Min-sik Choi), who, among other transgressions, has forgotten his daughter's birthday. After being freed on a charge of public intoxication, he is abducted and wakes up in what looks like a cheap hotel room, but is to be his prison for 15 years.
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Park loves Choi's deranged face, and treats the audience to frequent closeups of his unshaven maniacal grin as he caresses the TV screen (so starved is he for human contact), masturbates, teaches himself to fight by pounding walls with his fist, and plots his escape and revenge.
One day gas rolls into his room, a la TV's The Prisoner, and Dae-Su wakes up on a rooftop to find a man about to commit suicide. This bizarre encounter kicks off a five-day marathon of sleuthing, discovery and revenge, marked by several bloody brawls, and sex with a kindly female sushi chef (Hye-jeong Kang), who may or may not be conspiring with Dae-Su's captors.
Park imbues this mad chase with sardonicism and deranged energy, true to the movie's comic book template (it's taken from a popular Japanese manga). There are weird closeups, stop-action and odd gimmicks like a dotted line that suddenly appears between a knife and the eventual point of entry into its victim.
The labyrinthine trail to an enemy Dae-Su never knew he had underscores deeper thoughts on the nature of revenge. Both Dae-Su and the mysterious enemy have effectively lost their identities to revenge. It becomes clear hate is all that sustains them, and to reconcile it is to leave them empty.
A discomfiting film, but a stunningly-twisted artistic endeavour.
(This film is rated 18-A)