Year: 2013
Director: Spike Lee
Screenplay: Mark
Protosevich
Starring: Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Olsen, Sharlto Copley,
Samuel L Jackson
Synopsis is here:
If you type Oldboy
into your favourite search engine, you should notice that the 2003 Korean
thriller appears first, above this year’s remake. I say this now as it reminds
me of one thing: Spike Lee hasn’t ruined Oldboy. Has Matt Reeves ruined Let the Right One in?
Has Gus Van Sant besmirched your memories of Psycho? No. They haven’t. If you
think they have, then turn in your film fan card and give your original version
DVD’s to someone else.
That said, while imitation is the highest form of flattery,
such projects usually fail due to a misalignment of elements. The repeating of
sequences may satisfy an audience who feel they’re above reading subtitles, yet
these set pieces and narratives are regenerated without the reason why they
were so beguiling in the first place. Often it’s something cultural that’s
subtracted for the sake of boarding the perspective of the new viewers. Spike
Lee’s Oldboy suffers because it’s full of such examples.
Unlike The Departed, Scorsese’s crime drama, which took the
Hong Kong based Infernal Affairs and reformatted itself into a property that
could stand on its own two feet, Oldboy merely eliminates the oddities of its
Korean source material a simply movies the rest to American shores. The Oldboy narrative is so peculiar and the
original director so particular that a straight up reimagining just doesn’t cut
it.
If we liken films to cooking, Lee’s has the basic recipe,
but it’s possibly missing the unami paste that gives us a certain flavour.
Maybe certain ingredients have been placed in the oven a tad too long
(explaining Sharlto Copley’s over baked performance). Perhaps it forgets when
the pot needs to simmer and when everything needs to be brought to the boil.
This is a film which looks like it should taste the same, but will have you
reaching for the seasoning.
A scene we remember from the 2003 Oldboy has our lead
protagonist devour a live octopus on screen as he wishes to eat something
alive. After being locked up for 15 years, we are watching a character that is
quite simply dead inside. He is consuming the creature for feeling. Fast
forward ten years to the U.S counterpart. We have a moment in which Josh Brolin
spies an Octopus briefly. We’ve suddenly shifted from an acute visual metaphor
to a vague silly head nod. Now something which had significance is now rendered
near meaningless.
Spike’s take on the originals infamous corridor sequence is
one of the most striking moments of choreography of the year. It’s a solid
piece of action filmmaking and yet still it misses the point. Instead of a
character that is unsure of his capabilities, Brolin stomps on each stooge as
if he was a superhero with little weakness. No weakness, no worry.
You shouldn’t really compare remakes to their original
counterparts. However Lee’s Oldboy never strays too far from the original
property, and when it does, it sways into the wrong direction. I can once again
point you in the direction of Copley’s annoyingly distracting display, but here
is also the matter of Elizabeth Olsen being left out to dry with the flatly
portrayed character of Marie, as well as Brolin’s solid but overtly macho Joe
Doucett who is set up as a raging animal from the start and little of the
wounded beast which we remember Oh Dae-su.
You can sense that Spike is not that interested in the
studio system. He’s avoided it for most of his career and Oldboy shows why. So
many elements feel like studio influence as opposed to director’s choice. Take
away a few Spike traits and Oldboy could have been filmed by anyone. There is
little of Lee’s own persona or creativity to counterbalance the problems the
translation brings, so the outcome feels like a mishandled exercise more than
anything.
This American retelling loses much of the melodrama of the
Korean film mostly because American retellings have little time for such
things. Park Chan-Wook’s 2003 piece is a film that understands that stillness
is as important as ferocity. It’s no surprise that when we look Park’s work in
this year’s Stoker, it’s played with the same delicate touch. Spike's Oldboy is
primal from the get go, but adds no layers to itself. Broiln is an animal that
needs to be caged and that's it. There's little poetry to proceedings, the
tragic nature of the outrageous twists is never really peeked at. Simply put:
Oldboy is an opera that Spike tried to make a rap remix from.
