Spike Lee's Oldboy. Please Hammer, Do Hurt 'em.

So, my entertainment blog took me longer to get jumpstarted than I imagined. It's a long story followed by a long story followed by a long story and I already have a long story in front of me: Talking about Spike Lee's Oldboy.

Somewhere between ten years ago and today, if you were a movie guy like me, eventually someone would come up to you and say, "Dude dude dude, you've got to see this! It's Asian and fucked up… but it's totally AWESOME!" That movie was usually 2003 Korean movie Oldboy (Though I'm sure I can think of about a hundred other things that could fit), and oh, is it ever all these things and more. Director Park Chan-wook's film is a masterpiece of pitch-black revenge that only shows mercy when mercy would be the cruelest thing to deliver. Main actor Choi Min-sik's all-in performance where he even goes as far as to eat a live squid on camera is well worth the watch by itself.

Now, a good amount of us don't really talk about it much except it's about a man who is imprisoned for 15 years and goes on a journey to figure out why, maybe some of us would share a Youtube video of the hammer fight, but being tight-lipped because the movie really is something where you need to EXPERIENCE without anyone getting too far into telling you why. Oh, and we really want to see your The Ring face when it's over. Critics who deride it for being senseless violence and torment at the service of nothing deeper are kind of missing the point. It lives within the minds of the captor and the prisoner;they are both completely unhinged and so is the movie. 

So, naturally, when an American version was announced, the question wasn't *if* they were going to screw it up, but *how many ways* they were going to do it. They seemed to hit two right off the bat when it was announced Steven Spielberg and Will Smith were the director/actor combo. Spielberg can do dark revenge as he's shown with Munich, but nothing like this. Smith can play broken like in I Am Legend, but he also has to be a guy who can disappear for 15-20 years and then show up again and nobody recognizes him. If there's one thing that's almost impossible to do, it's not recognize Will Smith. 

I sat back and waited. I knew they weren't going to be the people who eventually made the movie because it made no sense. Eventually, people came along who did make sense: Spike Lee and Josh Brolin. Spike Lee's filmography is all over the place (From the essential Do the Right Thing to… She Hate Me), but among the people who have the grit and the balls to pull this off, Lee's one of the handful, not to mention Josh Brolin can pull off both a normal guy and a completely consumed instrument bent on revenge. So, I had some hope. I'm also not fundamentally against the aspect of a remake since the Korean Oldboy is a bastardization of a Japanese comic (Not called such because people LIKE it, but yeah, the movie is nothing like its source material).

Then things started happening. After the initial theatrical trailer touting an October release, publicity drifted off. The release date was quietly changed to Thanksgiving weekend (A time I'm sure all of you love your hard-R revenge thrillers), there wasn't even a TV ad of it until two weeks before its release, its release was dropped to 580 theaters, the director and Brolin weren't happy because its initial 3-hour cut was reduced to just under two, an artist who did initial mockups for the poster claims they were rejected and then suddenly used without proper compensation with Spike Lee issuing a curt reply on Twitter. In its opening weekend, the $30-million budgeted movie will struggle to make $2 million of it back. People seemed to want cancer more than they wanted to properly promote and release this movie. Surely a sign it's the biggest disaster of a foreign film being horrifically Americanized since the U.S. version  The Vanishing had the main character rise from his grave, right?

Well… not really( Six paragraphs in and I'm finally talking about the movie! This blog's not called "Too Few Words," is it?). If this movie had been properly promoted and released in a decent slot, it might've made its money back with very little bad blood except for what gets spewed on screen. It wouldn't have had nearly the amount of bad buzz, the controversial aspects would've fallen under the idea of, "There's no such thing as bad publicity," and life would've gone on. Now, is it a worthy re-imagining that can properly stand next to its Korean counterpart? Well… not really.

Spike Lee is working in full Inside Man mode. Spike Lee has his projects he puts his soul into and ones he crafts extremely well because it pays the bills but doesn't put his full heart into it. This is one of the latter. As much as people like touting Inside Man as this underrated classic, it's a pretty good little puzzle box of a heist movie but because of it, it keeps its distance from the characters aside from Clive Owen's thief who seems to be WAY too into how clever he is. However, even Inside Man has the context of how people interact in the melting pot of New York City in a post-9/11 environment. It also has this Bollywood fusion of a song in its opening credits which is so one of my jams. Oldboy is devoid of such context to help fill in the gaps. 

Oldboy is simply the story of an asshole alcoholic ad executive named Joe Doucett (Brolin) who makes life hell for everyone, especially himself. After a particularly bad drunken bender, he wakes in a locked hotel room. He receives daily meals of dumplings, Frosted Flakes (Really, Kellogg's? Product placement in THIS movie?), and vodka while occasionally getting hit with knockout gas so his captors can do anything from shave him to patch him up when he punches a mirror). His only companion is the television in which the often humorous side effects of this seen in the Korean film are missing here. It mostly acts as delivering indications of time passing and plot information, like Joe being framed for the rape and murder of his wife, though there is a particularly vicious moment this movie has over the Korean version where Joe finds out what happens when he tries to befriend a rat to quell his loneliness. 

Twenty years pass and Joe is tossed out into the world in a steamer trunk with cash, clothing, and a smartphone that has wallpaper of his daughter's face and a clock countering down to four days from his release (There's a clear sign of the deep cuts in editing when Joe knows how to slide the touch screen to accept phone calls on his smartphone, but he later doesn't understand why there are no pay phones and Yellow pages anymore). Free of his alcoholism and obsessed with proving his innocence to his daughter, he recruits his best friend Chucky (Michael Imperiori) and a homeless shelter worker Marie (Elizabeth Olsen) who takes pity on him to figure out who did this to him and why. It doesn't talk long for a menacing voice (Sharlto Copley) to start flooding his smartphone and give him a few helpful hints and not-so-helpful taunts.

While Spike Lee may be just doing his job, Josh Brolin brings it. Brolin can't be the same guy as Oh Dae-su from 2003's Oldboy and this movie knows it. Oh Dae-su is a pathetic man before his imprisonment who, despite having a bright and humorous side, is an alcoholic marshmallow of a salaryman. Josh Brolin is a harder slab of beef and when the movie has to show Joe being physical, well, let's just say there are more than a few, "Oh, SNAP!" moments. Sometimes literally. When Oh Dae-su tortures the manager of the "hotel" he was imprisoned in, he's nice enough to pass him off to his gang waiting in the hallway so their boss can get a blood transfusion before Dae-su squares against all 25 of the gang members. Joe is not such a gentleman. He also eats up and spits out any notions of this internal monologue shit.

Doucett's madness is far more internal and compact than Dae-su's insanity where it practically spills out into his face and Brolin infuses the character with the right amount of quiet intensity while still being able to elicit sympathy. The rest of the actors more-or-less get the job done. The only thing is Copley as the mastermind behind Joe's captor lacks a certain amount of threat. The Korean villain is equally effeminate and even wears a sun hat in one of his scenes, but still manages to convincingly keep his former prisoner at bay. Even with the gender-swapped badass bodyguard/sex partner, the American villain lacks a certain amount of bite, like if they'd cast Ralph Fiennes if he hadn't ever played things like a Nazi sniper or Voldemort. In fact, why didn't they get Ralph Fiennes? 

As for the rest of the movie, the word that comes to mind is "professional." It's professionally made and it feels like solid craftsmanship. There's nothing "bad" about it, but the thing is it needs a little more than to be a nicely-constructed cabinet. All of this may be from cutting down Lee's initial version, but it seems to not give much care about mood, which is one of the things the 2003 film excelled at. The Korean Oldboy could ratchet up tension and excitement when it needed to, but it mostly ruminated in the mood of a man who had nothing but long strings of time for years. The editing used a lot of fades and the music even utilized a lazy woodwind instead of something more typical and it worked. It marinates the emotion that adds flavor to it when it becomes serious business. The 2013 version wants to stay on task, it cuts through everything it needs to, and even makes the passage of time seem wonky, especially when Joe is imprisoned. It feels like four years pass like it was four days and there are weird realizations made at what feel like odd times (It's four years in when Joe discovers the hidden camera? Wouldn't he know every inch of that damn room by then?). When Samuel L. Jackson appears to take a Samuel L. Jackson role over 20 years, the only physical thing that changes about him is the color of his mohawk.

There's also that certain Hollywood gloss that gets on a lot of things. Spike Lee replicates the hammer fight from the Korean version in an accelerated version because Joe has leveled up about 10 times higher than Oh Dae-su and has no problem with sending every single gang member to hell, but the hallways feel more like a set and the action more artificial even as it's more brutal. The hole-in-the-wall bar Joe hides out in also is supposed to be this community of regular customers, but nobody notices when the fey British guy and his bodyguard just honker down for however long they've been there in one scene? Are Ron Burgundy's buddies also playing pool slightly offscreen and they haven't noticed that, either?

Maybe, even as someone who can accept the concept of a remake, I'm too close to the other movie. You'd probably need someone who has never heard of the Korean version and is going in knowing nothing to get just the right opinion on how the plot twists worked for them and shocking the surprises were.  It certainly has the guts and gumption of its Korean counterpart-WAY more than even I thought they would do-and they have the ingenuity to change things in meaningful ways and make some moments their own. I dare say the American ending's final shot is pretty much the perfect way to finish this story. Still, that means a lot of the plot is familiar to people like me, so aside from the curveballs Spike Lee throws in with a smile, it's hard to judge plot twists when they've already surprised you.

That said, Spike Lee's Oldboy seems to operate with a safety net, where no matter how shocking and horrific the actions are, there's only so much damage it can do. It's not bad per se, and I'd recommend checking it out if you have the stomach for a hard R violence and psychological damage, but dude dude dude, if you have Netflix, you should totally check out the Korean one right now! It's kind of fucked up and weird, but it's SO awesome!