Oh, Christ. These Korean movies sure make me work. Of the three I’ve seen (all of them for this website), each has caused a very strong reaction in me. I was forced to pontificate manically about Hera Purple: Devil Goddess (review here), a glorious tour-de-force of sleaze; expound at length my complicated objections to Samaritan Girl (review here), a movie that started out great but blew it at the halfway point; and rant in an absolute fury about H (review here), one of the most derivative and irritatingly stupid thrillers I’ve ever had the misfortune of viewing. And now I have to put in another loooong day’s work addressing Oldboy, my fourth Korean cinematic excursion courtesy of monstersatplay.

You know Oldboy. It’s the one where the guy gets locked in a hotel room for fifteen years and then released with five days to find out who put him there, killed his wife, and framed him for the murder. You also probably know someone gets his teeth pulled out with a hammer and that it won the Grand Prix at Cannes.

That’s all I’m gonna give you. I mean really, if you don’t already know the basics of Oldboy’s plot, you’re on the wrong website. What you hopefully want, and what would be of more worth at this point, is another opinion, since those are always variable. I’m happy to oblige. Verbosely.

To begin, I guess I can see where all the praise this film has received is coming from. It undeniably has a unique and often arresting visual style and a good sense of pacing. Make no doubt about it, there is artistry at work here; yet nevertheless, I’m afraid I can’t jump on the enthusiastic Oldboy bandwagon. There are just a few too many loose ends here for this to be a fully satisfying film experience.

To be sure, things start off well. The scenes of our hero, Oh Dae-su, imprisoned in a hotel room, being fed dumplings every day and put to sleep via valium gas every night are fascinating and set up a strong beginning to the narrative. Once Oh is mysteriously released, he goes on a quest to find those responsible for his imprisonment. It’s here where things started going slightly wrong for me, as Oh’s quest seems surprisingly passive for that of a man who’s been imprisoned for fifteen years. Detective work is surprisingly limited in this movie, aside from the claw hammer interrogation scene (which left much more to the imagination than I’d been led to believe, and which hobbles itself via the rather random use of Vivaldi’s “Winter”); and it seems that throughout the story, most of Oh’s discoveries are a product of happenstance rather than actual investigation, which kind of makes things feel a bit pointless.

Still, while this fact does lend the film a less-satisfying air, the technique is at least rather original, which nevertheless makes it interesting if a little less dramatically satisfying. What is completely unsatisfying, though, and what wrecked the movie for me, is the bizarre conclusion, which is completely jarring in its ridiculousness and totally took me out of the film.

It seems to be a common critical concession that the solution to this mystery is “implausible” at best, but I personally am not willing to limit myself to such a gentle descriptor. This ending is downright ludicrous. I’m sorry, but revenge plots don’t get much more convoluted than this; and if people were really able to wait this long for their gratification, our society would be plagued by drive-bys in front of nursing homes.

I can understand where others are coming from; after all, all of this convoluted plotting does serve to lend the film a sense of poetic justice. Still, there’s got to be a limit. When I’m chuckling in derision during the revelation of the grand scheme, something is amiss. I’m all for stretching logic a little to make a point, but I shouldn’t need a crane and a small miracle to suspend my disbelief. One can only ask for so much from one’s audience.

Similarly, I’m going to have to admit to finding the “twist ending” extremely telegraphed. I’d imagined something along those lines about as soon as possible; and really, when you consider the difference between the two (those who’ve seen this should know what I’m talking about…) and the fact that the there’s too great a question left unaddressed, it becomes kind of obvious, or at least I thought so. Perhaps my powers of deduction have just been too well-honed on various gialli… (I apologize for the vagueness of the last paragraph, but I’d still hate to ruin this for someone who couldn’t guess the twist).

Speaking of great questions being unaddressed, however, my final complaint stems from the fact that too much is forgotten or left unclear at the film’s end. The most major of these is the murder of Oh Dae-su’s wife: as far as I can recall (and I don’t believe I’m forgetting anything), Oh never clears himself of being framed for her murder. This seems to me a major oversight. Along with this, I was never quite sure of a number of other details, such as the circumstances of those imprisoning Oh. While I don’t consider it necessary that every movie explain every detail (in fact, I often welcome the opposite), I figure it would nevertheless be nice in a movie where the hero’s goal is to find out who wronged him and why.

Anyway, this is all a real shame, as I was liking Oldboy a lot up to its ending. The film definitely has a good sense of atmosphere about it, and it’s full of many graceful shots that definitely show a good deal of artistry. It occurs to me now that most of this review has been fairly negative, which might create a slightly skewed impression of my take on this film. There’s a lot to like about Oldboy, too, from the beautiful camerawork to the skillful acting by pretty much every member in the cast. I view Oldboy not as a bad film but as a good one ruined by ridiculous B-movie theatrics at its end. The widespread praise it’s received on almost all fronts has, therefore, forced me into a rather defensive position: I know we can all agree on the film’s good points; it’s the bad ones I need to address in detail.

At least I don’t have to express reservations about the work done by Tartan for this release. The image quality on this disk is very nice, clear and crisp and doing a good job of presenting the film’s extremely controlled color scheme. Audio is provided in both its original Korean and an English dub (which is expectedly inferior), and English and Spanish subtitles are included for the Korean-impaired.

As for extras, there are a wealth of bonuses here, though I must profess that they are, unfortunately, rather weak.

Things start off with an audio commentary (with director Park Chanwook and his cinematographer) that is crueler punishment than anything administered in the film itself. At the beginning of the talk, the two admit to being novices at the audio commentary game and quickly prove this assertion to the listener by fetishistically obsessing over lighting and color schemes. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a nuts-and-bolts discussion of filmmaking; however, I don’t particularly consider extended discussion of the merits of different lenses to be exactly enthralling. By the end of this track, I was wishing for a claw hammer of my own just to help me keep myself awake. For masochists still interested, the commentary is in Korean only; English and Spanish subtitles are provided.

Far more interesting is a seven-minute clip from a Q&A session with Park Chanwook, during which he responds to various questions from an audience. These range from technical-but-interesting queries to rather angry reactions posed as questions to the film’s twist ending, which, incidentally, didn’t phase me one bit (despite its predictability, I really have nothing against what happened, which, as usual, puts me in a minority). Of all the DVD’s features, this brief interview gives the best picture of Park as a director and provides the most information about his feelings about his film. (Ironically, this is the only feature without Spanish subtitles; which will leave our Spanish-only Monsters left in the dark. Quite a shame.)

Things wrap up with a bunch of deleted scenes that range from brutally boring (a ten-minute one take of all of Oh Dae-su’s improvised acting from when he is being held in the police station) to really interesting and affecting (can’t mention these…spoilers, you know…). More commentary is provided for these by Park, and it is again subtitled in both English and Spanish.

Finally, things wrap up with the film’s original trailer, a fan-made trailer that won Tartan’s fan-trailer contest, a collection of trailers for other Tartan releases, and a rather uninteresting set of stills from the film.

In the end, Oldboy seems, to me, like a very easy film to praise: it’s got a nice message at its core; and this makes it very easy for viewers to pat themselves on the back for deciphering it and agreeing with its plea for tolerance while ignoring the film’s failings. While the film does have a very nice moral at its core, I think it’s important to remember that a film is, with respect to narratives at least, a story first and a message second. Oldboy feels like a story by a precocious student in a college writing class: it becomes so occupied with adding layers to its hidden meaning that it completely loses track of its surface level, which has grown absurd with the introduction of so many pompous parallels, metaphors, and symbols. Nevertheless, there’s enough style here to allow me to give a half-hearted recommendation. This is a botched film, but it’s not without its merits; and it’s clear to me that writer / director Park Chanwook is a cinematic force to be reckoned with. Like the aforementioned hypothetical schoolboy, he just needs to reign himself in a little with the symbolic devices and focus first and foremost on telling a compelling story. Park has a great film inside him, I’m sure of that; and he will produce it soon if he hasn’t already.