Based upon "Oldboy" Co-Written and Directed by Park Chan-wook
Screenplay Written by Mark Protosevich
Directed by Spike Lee
1/2* (one half of one star)
I feel like I am in desperate need of a shower to rid myself of the filth I have just unearthed myself from.
It just pains me to write these words but I call them as I see them, dear readers. Spike Lee's "Oldboy," a remake of Director Park Chan-wook's South Korean cult classic from 2003, is, without question or debate, the absolute worst film I have seen in 2013. And furthermore, it is, without question or debate, the absolute worst film of Lee's otherwise glowingly illustrious film career. "Oldboy" is a ruthlessly, relentlessly repugnant exercise of pulp fiction at its grisliest and its most ultra-violent which would be just fine if the exercise were also not completely devoid of heart, soul and any sense of purpose or being.
Dear readers, I have expressed to you many times over the years that I am not one that is offended easily. The reputation of the original film's lurid nastiness and graphic violence, which I should inform you that I have not seen, precedes Spike Lee's new version quite heavily so I did have a strong sense of what I was getting myself into when I walked into the movie theater. I am also no tone who would tend to utilize art, and movie violence in particular, as a scapegoat for real world violence and brutality. That said, I do think that artists have a responsibility for what they chose to put out into the world for public consumption. Therefore, I just cannot understand why Lee would even chose to take this project at all as it seems to fly completely in the face of his entire oeuvre to date. To think, just last year, he publicly admonished Quentin Tarantino for making "Django Unchained" (2012), a film which he refused to see because he feared that it would trivialize the holocaust of slavery. Well Spike, congratulations!! You have just made a film that completely trivializes the human experience altogether as "Oldboy" is an ugly film about ugly individuals that is told without any sense of regard for any redeeming social or artistic value. It's nothing more than a snuff film with a big budget.
Beginning in the year 1993, "Oldboy" stars Josh Brolin as Joe Doucett, a raging, blustering, profane, misanthropic alcoholic and advertising executive who, after one more endless drunken binge in Chinatown, awakens the next day to find himself imprisoned in a tiny hotel room, complete with a bed, the most meager of toiletries, a television, and the servings of horrible Chinese food through a slot at the bottom of the door. Over the course of the following 20 years, Joe remains imprisoned and only aware of the events of the outside world via television news reports, one of which announces that he was accused of the rape and murder of his ex-wife and that his young daughter has been kidnapped. After Joe falls into crippling despair and even attempts to commit suicide, he then begins to plot his revenge against whomever has captured him. And then, one one fateful day, his chance for unrepentant retribution arrives as he is released from a trunk, with money and a cellphone, into an open field in the year 2013.
On the surface, there is nothing wrong with the plot of "Oldboy" and in fact, durign the first sections of Joe's imprisonment, the Kafka-esque nightmare quality of the story does lend itself for a roaring tale of revenge, much like Tarantino's extraordinary "Kill Bill" films (2003/2004). I would have nothing inherently against a revenge tale of such unrelenting torment and torture but rich storytelling and characterizations are the key, the very things that have elevated all of Tarantino's films to such a high artistic bar, which did indeed cast an enormous shadow over the tremendous flaws of "Oldboy." Additionally, for a film like this one, I just think that there needs to be an almost perverse and infectious sense of fun which will only serve to ingratiate your intended audience so they will indeed travel down the very grim paths the filmmakers place in front of us. Tarantino possesses that quality in spades as his nearly orgiastic glee with filmmaking and storytelling sweeps us along so breathlessly and with unshakable commitment. You know that he full believes in what he is doing, the story he is telling and the film he is making. Or how about a film like Oliver Stone's "U-Turn" (1997)? Flawed as it was, that movie did indeed feel as if Stone and his cast were having a blast telling a story of such nastiness that it felt like they were all seeing how much they could actually get away with and that joylessness did indeed keep me attentive, entertained and involved unlike his horrific "Savages" (2012), which was a film that was so joyless and artistically under-cooked from its paper thin story and one-dimensional characters.
"Oldboy" suffers the exact same fate as "Savages" through its forcibly profane and weakly executed screenplay, which commits the sin of not even establishing the character of Joe as a rooting interest. By the time he is apprehended very early in the film, we have not seen even one positive attribute about this man. This is not to say that the character has to be superficially "likeable." We just have to have a rooting interest in him as a hero, or in this case, an anti-hero of such severity. And while Brolin performs his role with a feral feverishness, Joe is, frankly, an asshole and so reprehensible that I really didn't care about his plan for revenge let alone root for him.
In my posting for "Thor: The Dark World," a film I carried a less than lukewarm reaction towards, I remarked upon how I felt the film contained absolutely no personality and a surprising generic quality that did not serve a hero of Thor's stature at all, or even a film that could separate itself from the rest of the bombastic CGI movies that are all over the theaters these days. The lack of personality is something that Spike Lee has never exhibited in his work. In fact, his personality has been so prevalent within his art that you can practically see his fingerprints all over every single one of his films...that is, until now and that made "Oldboy" especially troubling and even depressing because it barely feels as if there is even a trace of Lee's personality in the film at all.
Creating and maintaining one's personal stamp over thier films is difficult enough to accomplish in our increasingly homogenized 21st century cinema, but with American remakes of foreign films, I would imagine it to be an even more difficult feat to achieve. But, it can be done. I was extremely skeptical about Director David Fincher's remake of "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" (2011) but was ultimately surprised an d more than satisfied with the end result which honored the original film while existing as something Fincher probably would have made if the foreign film hadn't existed. Writer/Director Cameron Crowe's "Vanilla Sky" (2001), itself a remake of Director Alejandro Amenabar's excellent "Abre Los Ojos" (1997), not only honored the original material but miraculously also found a way to completely represent Crowe's sensibilities and artistic aesthetics and he ended up making one of my most favorite films from the last decade. I certainly would have loved to have seen what Spike Lee would achieve with the South Korean based material but it hardly felt that he even showed up for work. Yes, it is a good looking film, I guess. And yes, Lee does stage a few fight sequences featuring a hammer wielding Brolin against a small army of adversaries that are very well executed. But, where were those Spike Lee fingerprints I mentioned? Absolutely nowhere. Even his trademark credit "A Spike Lee Joint" was altered to the more traditional and therefore impersonal "A Spike Lee Film." And his trademark 40 Acres And A Mule production company logo, which ends every single film was nowhere to be seen at all.
If Lee was going to make even those kinds of changes, then it begs to question why he would even take on this film project in the first place? Would it be to have the opportunity to work within the studio system and budget again, to try and prove a certain box office weight in order to procure funds for more passion projects? Did he simply love the original film and wanted to take a crack at the material himself? Both of those possibilities are noble enough, I suppose. But, "Oldboy" felt as if he just didn't care enough to fully commit himself or there was nothing in the material for him to latch onto on a more personal level, thus rendering the exercise moot.
In addition to having a film with no real characters to speak of, an empty screenplay and the complete lack of presence from Spike Lee himself, "Oldboy" continues to suffer greatly due to its level of exceedingly graphic violence which was so gratuitous that I honestly felt violated. It was as if the invisible contract between myself and the work of Spike Lee had been rudely ignored and broken. It is not as f Lee has not handled heavy violence in any of his past films. Look at the murder of the character of Radio Raheem at the hands of the police in "Do The Right Thing" (1989), or the tragic, life-altering alley way beating of trumpeter Bleek Gilliam in "Mo' Better Blues" (1990), or the Marvin Gaye inspired Father/son shooting and murder in "Jungle Fever" (1991). On a wider scale, Lee has handled drugs and crime in the inner city in the extraordinary "Clockers" (1995) and then, in "Summer Of Sam" (1999), a film that what was possibly his widest conceptual canvas, Lee gave us his blistering portrait of 1977 New York and themes of suspicion and paranoia fueled by the murders committed by serial killer known as the "Son Of Sam." In all of those instances, and as graphic as the violence was depicted, Lee always ensured that any violence was story and character driven, which then placed the humanity and therefore, the inhumanity front and center, so as not to have his art fall into works of exploitation.
The violence of "Oldboy" is not presented in a provocative fashion or even one that is compelling or cathartic. It is a film where beatings, bludgeoning, torture, rape, and excruciating splatter filled shotgun blasts that explode heads and bodies completely apart rule the day...and for what and to what ends? Sometimes when I see an American remake o a foreign film, I like to see the original material to compare the two. In the case of "Oldboy," I just do not care if it was faithful or not because if this is the core of what the original film happens to be, then there is just no reason to put myself through something so senselessly horrific all over again. It is nihilism without purpose. It is soul numbing gore at its most vile.
Dear readers, I have no need or desire to have art, and especially the movies, make me feel safe. Sometimes the movies we need the most are the ones that rattle our cages, shake us up and alter our perceptions about the world and how we see it. Spike Lee has been a provocateur, one that has been equally infuriating and fair-minded and uplifting as well as existing as an artist of the highest order for over 25 years.
But for now, I seriously wish to believe that "Oldboy" is somehow some disgusting fluke of a film that even he will want to wash away from his resume.
SAVAGE POSTSCRIPT
At this time of writing, "Oldboy," which opened on Thanksgiving weekend has bombed at the box office and is very close to already leaving movie theaters. And it seems as if my feelings about the extreme lack of Spike Lee's personal stamp upon "Oldboy" were more true than I could ever have known. Since seeing the film, I have read articles, one of which was published in Variety, that the film was not only a box office disaster (and frankly, if you don't advertise your film--which the studio in question barely did--how do you expect anyone to go and see it?), both Lee and Josh Brolin are extremely unhappy with the final cut of the film, which was not Spike Lee's at all.
It turns out that those pesky powers-that-be took the film away from Lee and cut a hair of a full hour out of Lee's original and nearly 2 1/2 hour cut and even re-edited some sequences. During the editing stages, Lee was the one who changed his trademark credit to the impersonal "A Spike Lee Film" and even removed his company logo. Aside from that, Lee has said nothing publicly. Josh Brolin on the other hand has said that Lee's version of the film was much better but who knows if we'll ever get to see that cut.
Even so, I had to review what I saw and furthermore, if Lee's original cut does see the light of day, I really don't know if it is worth going through this morass of filth all over again.
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