Hi everyone! Today we're going to talk about Oldboy, Park Chan-Wook's famously twisted masterpiece, and Spike Lee's notoriously mediocre reinterpretation.
The plot of both films remains the same: One rainy night, a man is mysteriously captured and thrown into a room for fifteen years. He struggles to keep his sanity over a decade of solitude, and almost escapes. Then one day, he is suddenly released. He immediately embarks on a quest to reunite with his daughter and answer the question that has been haunting him for decades: why was he locked up? And why was he set free?
The original film, directed by Park Chan-Wook, starred Choi Min-sik as Oh-Dae Su, a simple family man who is kidnapped on the night of his daughter's third birthday. When he is released, he meets Mi-Do (Kang Hye-Jeong) a strange young woman, who is immediately attracted to Dae-Su and decides to help him find his captor. Meanwhile, Dae-Su is contacted by a mysterious man (Yoo Ji-Tae) who claims that the secret to Dae-Su's imprisonment lies in his past...
In Spike Lee's Oldboy, Josh Brolin plays Joe Ducett, a womanizing alcoholic who is wandering around the city when he gets captured. When he is released years later, he immediately sets out to find his daughter, who has been taken hostage by his captor, Adrian Pryce (Sharlto Copely). Along the way, he runs into Marie Sebastian (Elizabeth Olsen), a nurse who finds out his story and decides to help him get back his daughter.
Even with the reinterpretation tag, the 2013 version is actually a very faithful adaptation of Park's controversial film. Despite this, the adaptation adds on some gore without reaching half of the suspense of the original, leading to a pretty flat thriller.
Hit read more to find out why, and to hear about some of the casting controversies behind Oldboy.
If you want to figure out why the 2013 Oldboy fell flat without having to watch the 2013 Oldboy, I would suggest checking out the original and reinterpreted hammer scene.
The new hammer scene, unlike the original, isn't a continuous shot and trades the haunting score for more upbeat, typical American action movie music. More importantly, in the original version, it actually looked like Dae-Su might lose. However, in true American style, Ducett beefcakes his way past waves of fighters, and the fight so clearly belongs to him from the beginning that it in the end, the whole sequence looks ridiculous.
This sort of easy, simplification of the hero continues throughout the film. While is a lot more blood in the 2013 version, but it doesn't make the film seem more brutal. Instead, the fights are too quick, and you know the superhuman Ducett can easily get out of each one. This was my main complaint with the remake: the characterization is a whole less layered, and less interesting. For Dae-Su, his imprisonment, gradual insanity, and escape is each a genuine struggle, and reinforce the importance of a recurring question of the movie: "Even if I'm a beast, don't I deserve to live?" Dae-Su's struggles and failures show how our humanity can survive even the darkest events. Ducett, meanwhile, seems to swing from caricature to caricature. While Dae-Su was introduced as a drunk man, silly, maybe annoying, but not a bad person, Ducett was shown to be violent from the start. Even in high school flashbacks, he doesn't seem like an insecure kid but an unusually cruel, 80's teen movie bully. He switches from this stereotype to the perfectly trained killer, to selfless father without a beat. It erases a lot of the heart of the film when its protagonist comes off as a one note character (or about three one-note characters) who, in the face of immense tragedy, effortlessly transforms into a superhuman revenge machine.
Additionally, the American version is more realistic, which I don't think necessarily works better for this movie. A lot of the semi-fantastic Chan-Wook touches are erased, such as the hypnosis (which is pretty central to the plot in the original) and the ant on the train. I can understand wanting to cut out some of these elements, but if a guy is locked up for decades and suddenly gets out, I've already suspended my disbelief. These moments only added to the haunting atmosphere of the film.
Th 2013 film also changed the motivation and the characterization of the main villain, which would be fine, if Sharlto Copely could carry the role. I'm usually a big fan of Copely, but I feel like his Pryce was, like Brolin's Ducett, a bit too big. He came off as a mustache twirling joke of a villain. Meanwhile, Yoo Ji-Tae's performance in the original movie was incredibly moving, especially considering the depths he had to go for this character's combination of thinly veiled wrath and warped logic to be believable.
Additionally, I have a problem with the ways that all the villainous characters are Other-ed in the American film, compared to straight white Brolin. Samuel L. Jackson makes an appearance as a sadistic thug, and Copely's Pryce is pretty heavily queer coded.
Additionally, the movie's sole Asian American character has hardly any lines. She is one of the few named (and alive) women in this movie, and is the only Asian character (I really feel like if they appreciate Asian movies, they might as well give some love to Asian American talent. You don't have to make everyone white to prove it's set in the U.S.) She's a pretty textbook dragon lady-- all she does is serve Price while in really impractical outfits for a bodyguard, and sort of threaten Ducett (although she, of course, ultimately loses to him.)
It's worth noting that Lee did make an effort to find an actress of Korean descent, Pom Klementieff, to play the Korean character, which is sadly rare in American film. Additionally, she and Lee worked together to find a suitable Korean name for the character, and came up with Haeng-Bok.
However, the flip side of this is that they didn't bother naming the Asian woman in the original script. There was some controversy over the lack of diversity and the heavy stereotypes in the casting call for the film, something that Lee responded to.
To be fair, I don't think Lee's Oldboy was as bad as the critics made it out to be. But if you're planning to watch both of them, watch the 2013 Oldboy first, then the original. But if you're only watching one, and you can deal with subtitles, I highly suggest watching the original film.
