A remake of Park Chan-wook’s wild, brooding 2004 South Korean import, Oldboy, directed by Spike Lee, arrives with its core, jaw-dropping twist intact. Like its predecessor, too, it’s part knuckle-bruising revenge thriller and part dark mystery, telling the story of a kidnapped man who, upon being freed, sets out to identify and destroy the stranger who imprisoned him in solitary confinement for 20 years. Grimy and involving early on — and benefiting from its decidedly out-there premsie, with native roots in a Japanese manga — Lee’s streamlined genre offering achieves a certain level of idiosyncratic hold without ever planting deeper roots of its own.
When viewers first meet Joe Doucett (Josh Brolin), he’s a self-sabotaging, alcoholic salesman whose disease and general loutishness cost him a much-needed sale. On the way home, already stumbling drunk, he’s turned away from another drink by his bar owner friend Chucky (Michael Imperioli). When Joe wakes up the next morning, he’s in what looks like a hotel room. Problem is, there’s no way out.
Food and grooming supplies arrive intermittently, and Joe remains there for the next two decades — not only learning of world events by television, but also reacting in horror to news reports that peg him as the on-the-lam prime suspect in the brutal murder of his ex-wife. Then, one day, Joe awakens in a field in a trunk. He begins searching for clues to try to explain his abduction, and also reunite with his obviously estranged, now-adult daughter, Mia (Elvy Yost), to whom he wants to deliver a mass of letters he has written her faithfully over the years.
He’s befriended and aided by a social worker, Marie (Elizabeth Olsen), who’s a bit of a wounded bird herself. Upon piecing together the location of his imprisonment, Joe extracts a measure of payback against his jailer (Samuel L. Jackson), and eventually comes into contact with Adrian Pryce (Sharlto Copley), the mastermind behind his captivity.
Lee’s stab at this sort of pulp fiction — billed in the possessive as a film in the opening credits, not his usual “joint” — is a curious thing, and certainly a band apart from his typical fare. The screenplay adaptation is by Mark Protosevich (The Cell, I Am Legend), and it pays homage to Park’s movie in a number of ways, in both words and visuals. Still, while it’s somewhat bracing to see Lee bring to bear his gifts on this unapologetic of a straight genre piece (the evocative framing that he and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt devise is most richly on display in flashback sequences in which Brolin shares the screen with a younger, prep school-age Joe), there’s also a nihilism which seems less rooted in character than merely impressed upon the narrative by template, or fiat.
Joe, during his long incarceration, gives up alcohol and dedicates himself to reshaping his mind and body so that he may one day try to make amends with Mia. But Lee seems put off or bored by this notion, hungry to get to the film’s action and torture, or any number of other baroque monstrosities that will surely bring to mind the name Scott Tenorman for South Park fans. After Joe gets loose, 35 or 40 minutes into the film, there’s not a true, integrated throughline of the unhinged madness — as captured so mesmerizingly by wild-eyed Choi Min-sik in the original film — that would result from being sealed off from all human contact for two decades. Yes, there’s the matter of revenge driving the plot, but this decidedly unordinary Joe could have been an even more compellingly imbalanced character.
A lot of what makes Oldboy unique or interesting (and is therefore integral to either one’s enjoyment or disdain for the film) is wrapped up in its third act twists, which are best left undiscussed, for those who haven’t seen Park’s 2004 film. Suffice to say that a good bit of Oldboy kind of washed over me. If Jackson is again basically just doing Jackson, and Copley’s ridiculous facial hair and equally theatrical line readings make his character seem like some weirdo out of an Alex Cox fever dream, Brolin and Olsen are dialed in and in tune with one another. They’re the film’s heart, and its rhythm when they are on screen, especially together, is mostly strong and steady.
The ending, though, is over-dialed by about two-thirds. In addition to a rather sigh-inducing literal explanation that exposes the shaky psychological reasoning of its villain, the movie opts for a different denouement that, no matter how broken its subject, still seems a bridge too far. It doesn’t completely negate Oldboy‘s bleak pleasures for those who have surfed their wave, but it seems like a flourish merely for the sake of a flourish — a strange and off-center stab at redemption where perhaps there is none to be found. (FilmDistrict, R, 103 minutes)