REVIEW - OLDBOY

This is the danger of remaking a movie. You end up blurring the line between what's known and what's not known. How to keep up with Spike Lee's Oldboy: I don't know whether it's harder if you have or have not seen Park Chan Wook's original... maybe it'd be harder if you have not, though also less disappointing. Lee and writer Mark Protosevich have taken what they wanted from Park's film and left the rest to rot, finally dribbling out this splutter of a thriller, at once way too many things and not nearly enough. Lee's film feels cramped and cloistered, but not intimate, with most of the emotional scope and situational grandeur of its predecessor shorn off. A lean, laser-focused thriller is what's intended of what remains, but the pace of the narrative, so eager to upend your expectations, does not give itself easily to such a direct approach, and Lee is ever too enamoured with what excess he can sporadically fling at his films to steer such nimble material into appropriately calm waters. His film ends up garish, straining for operatic intensity, but lacking the depth of technique to achieve it with any real resonance. What changes Protosevich makes to the plot are cosmetic, not poignant enough to differentiate the plot from that of the 2003 film, and if they were therefore proposed as improvements, they've wholly failed. Josh Brolin emits the occasional screech of mania to remind you of his talents as an actor, but is like the film in the respect that it seldom comes to life, and when it does it's crude and hollow. Lee and Protosevich adopt a prudish tone with the story's more shocking developments, a disrespectful tone that sensationalises these elements and moulds a film that thrives on scandal and humiliation (and B-movie violence), instead of provocation. I'm not going to mention Sharlto Copley, since I've chosen to erase all memories of his presence in the film. Its saving grace is that not even this colossal a fuck-up can entirely ruin what narrative qualities it has inherited.