Last spring, I was teaching a course on Greek drama when a colleague teaching the same class proposed running Oldboy for our respective classes because it was based on the legends of Oedipus apparently. I was hesitant. I knew Oldboy largely by its reputation and understood it to be a brutal film. The middle and most famous installment in South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s “Vengeance Trilogy,” I was uncomfortable running it for students and suggested we go with Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island instead. I spoke to a co-worker who is far more familiar with Korean entertainment than I am since she married a Korean man, and her response was that a graphic sex scene would probably be inappropriate for the classroom. She then urged me to see the movie for myself that weekend.
That wasn’t a bad idea. Small problem: at the time, it wasn’t streaming anywhere, even as a digital purchase or rental. DVDs that would play on an American machine were also incredibly expensive for a movie I might only watch once. Yes, I had intended to go see it someday, but not for that kind of money. Fortunately, the 20th anniversary saw the movie remastered and rereleased, so I could get a chance to see it after all.
Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) is a somewhat shlubby businessman who got a little drunk the night of his toddler daughter’s birthday when, after being bailed out by a friend, he disappears without a trace off the streets of an unnamed South Korean city. He awakens to find himself in some kind of hotel prison. He can’t get out. He has a TV and a bed, he’s fed the same fried dumplings every day, and every so often, he’s gassed so people can come in to clean his room and give him a haircut. One year in, the news tells him his wife was murdered and the evidence at the scene suggests he did it. Like a lot of people in prison, he takes up boxing and works to escape, but before he can get that done, and 15 years later at that, he’s released on a rooftop not far from where he was taken. Who took him? Why? He has no idea. But he wants two things: he wants revenge and he wants answers. Not necessarily in that order.
He does get an ally early on in the form of a young sushi chef named Mi-do (Kang Hye-jung) and his old pal Joo-hwan (Ji Dae-han) who owns an Internet cafe. And he’s not a bad investigator. Except, the man responsible soon shows himself (Yoo Ji-tae), and he’s a very rich man who indicates that whatever he was doing to Dae-su isn’t over yet. If Dae-su truly wants answers, he’ll have to let things play out or solve the mystery. And if he doesn’t, Mi-do, who Dae-su has fallen in love with, will be killed herself. But who is this mysterious, wealthy man. Dae-su has no idea who he is or why he wants vengeance against Dae-su. The answers, as they come out, will be horrifying for all involved.
OK, so, I knew the big twists involved with this movie before I saw it. Consequently, I was expecting certain reveals and the like, including an infamous hallway scene where Dae-su takes on a dozen or so henchmen with only a run-of-the-mill hammer as a weapon. Combine that with my co-worker’s warning about the sex scene and what I knew about the reasons for the vengeance, and I was expecting something that would be difficult to watch. It was at times, to be clear, but the sex and violence that the movie actually shows were actually not as intense as I thought they would be. I’ve seen worse in American movies, and those can be pretty tame compared to European movies. Indeed, the worst acts of violence take place off-screen. All the stomach-churning uncomfortableness comes from the imagination in most cases plus the existential horror when Dae-su realizes what’s really going on. This is not a gentle movie, but it’s more psychological than visceral, and when I told my co-worker there, she basically said that Oldboy was pretty intense at the time it came out by Korean standards.
I can see that. But even though I knew the twist at the end of was coming, it didn’t make the reveal any less powerful. It’s helped by Choi Min-sik’s performance as the lead character and especially Yoo Ji-tae’s turn as the sort of villain that the audience might really want to see suffer. The anguish at the end of all this, the fact that the entire movie, not just the time set in the prison, was all part of a revenge plot and what it was revenge for is exceptionally well-done, and like many Korean projects I’ve seen–and I haven’t seen much but this covers many that I have–the class consciousness on display probably adds to the gut reaction I had to the movie’s villain. This isn’t the sort of movie to get a Hollywood ending where Dae-su gets the vengeance he’s after. If anything, the ending leaves a lot to interpretation. I can appreciate that.
That said, I have no intentions of watching the American remake, but the other two parts of the Vengeance Trilogy are apparently on Tubi. Those I’ll try to check out some time.
Grade: A
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