Oldboy (“Oldeuboi”)

What Jesse said:

Yo – you have to watch Oldboy – it’s a Korean revenge flick and it’s awesome. It’s so awesome that I can’t even tell you about it. Just watch it. Oh, and it’s going to be remade this year so you’ll want to watch the original first. It has subtitles though – sorry.

Mike’s verdict:

This one was fairly good. A lot of Korean films lose pretty much everything in translation (at least I assume that’s the problem, since people are always raving about them and I never get it). But Oldboy came through pretty well. I thought it moved a little slow in the middle, but that seems to be what we call ‘building suspense’ now anyway. My main concern with Oldboy is the big twist. It’s super obvious. I mean, super, super, obvious. It’s the very first thing you think. That being said, it’s so super obvious that I immediately discounted it as too obvious. So when I finally reached the big reveal at the end, I had spent so much time exploring all the other possibilities that the truth really was a big shock. Kudos Chan-wook Park, kudos.

Bottle line: It’s not a movie I plan to watch again, but I’ll give it an 8/10 for the mind-games. And I’ll definitely check out the Spike Lee version when I get the chance, if only to see what he does differently.

UPDATE: I’ve now reviewed the Spike Lee remake too.