User Reviews

Oldboy really is an odd movie. It's totally unconventional, completely original, and unlike anything else you'll probably find out there, even in the realms of Asian cinema. To say too much would be to spoil the ride, but this is a film where you'll always be guessing what's going to happen next and never quite sure what's really going on.

It's a bleak, dark movie that begins very well indeed and stays strong throughout. Chan-wook Park is an expert director and really handles everything well. He's blessed with a superior leading man in Choi Min-sik, the kind of actor who gives his all to the movie, no restraint, no mild-mannered acting here...he lives and breathes the role and you believe in him at all times. Kang Hye-jeong, starring opposite him as love interest Mido, is also very effective, completely lovely and just right for her role.

As for the story... wow. This movie has a brilliant script that constantly surprises you right up until the very last scene. Twists are commonplace these days, but the one found here is the most shocking I've ever seen. OLDBOY has it all, really. A great story unveiled in a leisurely way, piece by piece, no hurry. Touches of the surreal – the disgusting octopus-eating scene is everything you'd imagine it to be. Great acting, great technical aspects. There's violence too, of course. The tooth-pulling torture is probably the most squirm-inducing bit, but the highlight for me is the one-take corridor battle which has to be seen to be believed. One guy with a hammer versus twenty hoods...well, watch it and find out what happens.

By the time the ending comes and you find out why Oh Dae-su was imprisoned, you realise you're watching a masterwork of cinema. It's not an easy film to sit through by any means, but it is affecting and it is very well made indeed. Challenging, gut-punching and outrageous: OLDBOY is one of the bad boys of our time.

Hi! I am a South Korean national student here in London, and would like to give you some clues why the main character, Oh Dae-Soo, was kept in the private prison for exactly 15 years and why he ate the live octopus as I hope you all understand this film a little better.

Firstly, his wife was killed one year after his being kept in the privately run prison. Obviously, Oh Dae-Soo didn't kill her but was suspected of murdering her. It must be done by Lee Yu-Jin who planned to have his sister's revenge upon Oh Dae-Soo. In South Korea, criminals of unsolved crimes including murder cases are forgiven/overlooked by law 15 years after the crimes were committed, which means a murder suspect wouldn't be charged or get punished unless the suspect is caught within 15 years after the murder. This is why Oh Dae-Soo was released 15 years after his wife was killed. Thus, he wouldn't be disturbed by the police investigation and Lee Yu-Jin could play with him at his own discretion.

Secondly, nobody in the country eats live octopus like the way he ate in the film. It seems to me that the scene shows his uncontrollable anger against the man who he talked with on the phone and didn't say anything about the reasons why he was kept in the prison. If there was a piece of cake or a bowl of rice in front of him, I guess he would probably eat it in the same way he did with the octopus. So, please don't get it wrong that eating something alive is part of Korean culture. It should be understood itself in that extreme context.

I saw this film several times with my friends. I didn't quite understand it in the first view but came to like it in the second time and it's one of my favourites now. I like the complicated plot and the shocking ending. As I'm studying translation of English and Korean, most of my classmates and friends are English who spent some time in South Korean and they liked this one the most among other Korean films.

I hope my talk helps.

Armond White of the NY Press has called it a "virtuosic stupid movie". I think that's exactly right.

Certainly the movie looks fantastic. I liked the surrealistic touches. I think the director has a real imaginative way of capturing the process of memory -- there's an extended flashback about 3/4 way through which I think is as well conceived and shot as anything I've seen. The acting is standout. Hell, I even liked the score.

But the movie almost aggressively makes no sense.

SPOILERS Leave aside for a moment the obvious plot holes, large and small -- although it's worth noting that there's a whole lot of them. Leave aside the contrivances, too: the endless special gadgets the bad guy comes up with just when he needs them, the rather magical view of hypnosis, Dae-Su's magical new abilities, the seeming omnipotence of the badguy. Let's assume all this is beside the point, and that we're supposed to take the movie more or less symbolically ala FIGHT CLUB (probably the closest reference).

The movie doesn't make any sense thematically, either. What's it really about? The virtue of keeping your mouth shut? The movie seems to suggest that the bad guy's sexual relationship with his sister is just fine, the problem seems to be Dae-Su's big mouth. The movie rather laboriously teaches this: the sister kills herself because of the rumors which somehow the sister believes to be true (?); Dae-Su becomes convinced that he was, in fact, at fault; Dae-Su cuts his own tongue out; Dae-Su pleads that Mi-do never learn the truth; Dae-Su even ends up brainwashing himself via hypnosis to forget the truth -- or "keep his mind shut", in a sense. I mean, huh? This is a pretty juvenile kind of ethics, to be blunt about it. Although Dae-Su is the protagonist the movie really doesn't seem to be on his side. It also hints at a weird kind of passivity: for all of the hammer swinging and octopus eating, Dae-Su doesn't really do all that much: things are done to him, and eventually he begins to internalize the abuse given to him.

Is it about the futility of revenge? One would think, particularly with the references to COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. But leaving aside the notion that Dae-Su's tormentor's omnipresence seems to weigh against the notion of him and Mi-do doing anything, really, but take their lumps or try to fight back, the fact that Dae-Su is considered by the movie to have really "done" something makes any critique pretty complicated. Remember, in COUNT Dantes is a true innocent. His motives are as pure as revenge ever gets -- that's why Dumas's ultimate critique, his ultimate notion that revenge even for the Count is wrong works so well. The force is seen in isolation. Here, though, it seems more a case of Dae-Su learning how "bad" he really is. He shouldn't take revenge because he really IS at fault.

I guess you could argue that the movie shows revenge is futile from the bad guy's point of view. Then why are we watching Dae-Su at all? Maybe the point is that everyone feels themselves righteous until they realize the true dimensions of their "sin". But I don't see a lot of people facing up to facts in the movie: I see a lot of denial, in fact. Dae-Su admits to his relatively "minor" sin but can't face up to his "major" one.

After I saw this I read some interviews with the cast and crew, and apparently some of this vagueness is intentional -- we're supposed to be left unsure. Well, the movie is successful in that, but I think it's an unworthy goal, an abdication of the artist's responsibility. People have bristled at the charge that this movie is nihilistic, but if that really is the point, that the movie's supposed to throw up it's hands and say, "hey, I dunno, you figure it out", then that truly is nihilism.

Ah well, I could go on, but I won't bore you. A virtuosic stupid movie indeed, I think: often amazing to watch but underneath the surface just a whole bunch of muddleheadedness.

Oldboy is one of the most intense movies you will ever see. Breathtaking, brutal and easily one of the best revenge movies ever made. The acting is amazing, especially Choi as the main protagonist Dae-su Oh. All the actors did great but his performance was powerful and emotional (all you need to do is see the infamous squid scene). Chan-wook Park gives this movie a very unique style with his direction. The plot starts off like a fairly standard revenge drama but he slowly makes the movie darker through a series of beautifully shot flashbacks and a huge scene involving nothing but a family photo album.

If you can't handle extremely strong violence, torture, sex and language and can't stand subtitles it's best you stay far away from Oldboy....if you can, though, then watch it! It's an incredible movie with some of the best performances, a moving score and a disturbing but unique plot with twist after twist.

5/5

In Park Chan-wook's 'Oldboy' (which won the grand prize at Cannes in 2004 when Tarantino was at the helm), a rough-looking man is held by the cops for some hours after a drunk. A series of relentless jump-cuts show him misbehaving at the police station. Once bailed out, he suddenly disappears in a pour-down rain while his rescuer is in a phone booth. The next we know he's imprisoned in a tiny apartment-like jail cell, and is held there for….fifteen years! Again jump cuts take us through this experience, which includes pumped-in gas while he sleeps, self-tattoos of cross-hatching to remind himself of the years, a journal, a constant TV which is his only companion, imaginary swarms of insects, and personal martial-arts conditioning that includes punching the wall till his knuckles bleed.

Once released, having a taste for something other than the pot-stickers he was served all the time in his prison, our man stops at a sushi bar and asks for "something live." He's brought an octopus as big as two fists and he gobbles it -- live -- and passes out. The female sushi chef presiding at this event bonds with the man and they go looking for whoever imprisoned him and try to find out why. I forgot a man who jumps off the roof of the prison building before this: but nobody could keep track of all the hyper-kinetic, dark, grungy contents of 'Oldboy.' It's in Korean, by the way, and if you don't know Korean you may miss a bit of the dialog. It's got those subtitles that fade when the background's light, and they flick by pretty fast too.

What is clear is that as somebody taunts him, Oh Dae-Su's just in a larger prison when his captors let him out, and what he does is part of a maniacal scheme to do him far worse harm than mere physical confinement.

What's initially endearing about this accomplished but cartoon-like revenge-mystery action film, apart from Choi Min Sik's gonzo performance as Oh Dae-Su, the imprisoned man who turns sushi freak, is its obsessiveness, which Choi's intensity neatly underlines. The troubles begin when you realize that however maniacally determined Oh Dae-Su's pursuit of his tormentor and unraveling of his imprisonment's secrets are, it's all ultimately lost on us because it makes little logical, and even less emotional, sense. Or, where it does make sense, it's patently impossible.

Park Chan Wook is a clever and inventive filmmaker who like many of the other 'dark,' 'cool' filmmakers of today has a visual style that outstrips his ability to tell a story. Since you could have said that about The Big Sleep and many still do, it may be that critical head-shaking over 'Oldboy' will seem passé in time and the film will morph into a classic. It's been said already though that Park is pursuing cult status faster than he can keep up with himself.

The encrustation of the mechanical upon the living was Bergson's definition of the comic, and by that definition this movie should be a laugh riot. There's both elaborate visual trickery and intense real physicality -- witness Oh Dae-Su's consumption of the octopus. He really bites the thing's head off and chews on the still-writhing tentacles as they nervously coil round his cheek. The martial arts sequences are tricky and complicated; I doubt that the actor is doing all his stunts like Tony Ja in 'Ong-bak: Thai Warrior,' but his physicality is down to earth as he punches out one thug after another. No jumping, just punches and falls. But the images and their sequencing are most artfully manipulated. There's a sex scene, and an erotic scene, and a torture sequence involving dental extractions.

How Oh Dae-Su finds people and how people find Oh Dae-Su is pretty confused. There's a vague sense that those tormenting Oh Dae-Su are evil masterminds à la James Bond. They have gangster connections and there's a posh huge penthouse at the end. But our hero seems to have been held in a kind of rent-a-jail cell, and whoever ordered up this treatment was apparently connected with something more mundane than Goldfinger: simply a schoolmate who bears Oh Dae-Su an obscure grudge. When the school enemy appears, if I've got this right, he seems to be a decade or two Oh Dae-Su's junior. Does it matter? Well, cultists of the movie will want to explain everything. But not rest of us, because the people aren't real or specific enough for us to care. Choi Min Sik's a gnarly little dynamo (his wacko behavior fits better here than it did in the artistic biography Chihwaseon) and his nemesis is a tall, cool, godlike personage. That's the point. The contrast is enough.

Oldboy has hints of Tarantino and Tarantino's Asian martial arts sources, but although there's a lot of dialog, as far as one can tell the talk is very far from Pulp Fiction's priceless exchanges.

You think the idea's unique -- imagine being locked up for fifteen years without explanation -- but then you realize it's not only what happened to Victor Hugo's Jean Valjean, but essentially what happens to a lot of black men in America, only then it isn't the beginning of a hip nightmare film. The imprisonment of black men is the real tale of society's revenge on an undeserving minority, but Oldboy's maniacal and inexplicable personal revenge of one middle class man on another has no social significance; worse yet, it never acquires an emotional one.

Director Park Chan Wook is a director to reckon with -- some of Oldboy's sequences are hard to forget -- and he's found a worthy star in Choi Min Sik. But this disturbing, violent movie is clever without being intelligent.

'Oldboy' is constantly mentioned as one of the greatest Korean films ever made, and has also been called the most disturbing Korean film (followed by 'I saw the Devil' and 'The Chaser', which were both incredibly disturbing). I therefore eagerly watched the film in high anticipation, but am quite sad to say I was very disappointed. It started off very interesting and mysterious, and the story was told in a very unique way. The moment Oh Dae Su is released, the film becomes very neo-noir-ish (and I don't enjoy neo-noir) and I actually found it to me more comedic than disturbing or suspenseful. Choi Min-sik was excellent, as usual, and without him in the lead I might have liked the film even less. So, essentially the film is about an old school friend, Lee Woo-jin, who wants to avenge Oh Dae-Su for Lee's sister's suicide. Because of this he locks him up for 15 years, then sets him free after 'programming' both him and his daughter via hypnosis to fall in love. Uhmm, ok... Ok, spoilers to follow, so stop reading if you don't want to know. Is this filmed said to be the most disturbing film simply because it is revealed the woman he so eagerly had sex with is actually his daughter? Nothing else in the film is disturbing. When all is said and done and Lee kills himself (what an anti-climax!!), Oh Dae-Su tracks down the hypnotist and asks her to erase his memory of his daughter so they can have a relationship. Seriously!!?? So he'd rather have her as his lover than his daughter?? I rest my case...

While Hollywood is slowly choking to death on clichés and unrealistic budgets, the movie lovers turn their attention to Asia. Especially interesting is Korea's emerging movie industry. Japan has a long tradition of quality horror and anime and China dominates the epics with state-sponsored spectacles. Which place Korea will take we don't know but if Oldboy is any inclination it would be intelligent, disturbing drama-action movies.

Oldboy has an extremely intelligent and edgy script, which will make you think and question your morals. It would NEVER be picked up in Hollywood. Even the initial concept of being locked up for 15 years without apparent reason would be deemed to strange for the audience. Thankfully, the Korean producers could see the brilliance of the script and give it a shot. It's budget is some $4 million, which is amazingly well used.

Oldboy is very much the child of it's director, Chan-Wook Park, who's name should warrant a lot more fame than it does. The camera-work and pacing is amazing. There are virtually no dull moments. The fighting scenes are used to compliment to movie, not to give a reward after half an hour's boredom.

The lead actors are no less amazing. Min-Sik Choi is a perfect anti-hero. Unlike the Western antiheroes, he even has the looks of an everyman, which makes his transformation so much more spectacular. The lead actress is a bit understates in my opinion, but memorable never the less. The best one is by far Ji-Tae Ju, the charismatic villain. He dominates every scene he's in, a sort of Korean Christian Bale American Psycho.

Music and choreography is great as well. All the details and the grit makes the movie really come alive. At the end, you are in awe, a rare feeling for a movie. The feeling stays with you for days. Occasionally you will think of the movie and shake your head, unbelieving someone could actually pull it off.

So do yourself a favor, watch Oldboy. You will not be disappointed.

Oldboy is set in Korea & starts as a drunken Dae-su Oh (Min-Sik Choi) is bailed out of the police station by his friend only to be abducted, Dae-su wakes up & finds himself in a small room which he will be imprisoned in for the next fifteen years. Dae-su is fed & looked after by his unknown captors but is never allowed out of the room, Dae-su begins to train himself to avenge himself after he gets out which he intends to do by scrapping away the cement from the brickwork with a chopstick. However before Dae-su finishes he is gassed & rendered unconscious, when he wakes up Dae-su finds himself free on the roof of a tall building dressed & all moneyed up. Dae-su instantly sets about trying to find out who imprisoned him, after meeting the pretty Mido (Hye-jeong Kang) the two fall in love & together with her help Dae-su finally finds what he is looking for but the truth comes at a price...

This South Korean production was co-written & directed by Chan-wook Park & has gotten any number of glowing reviews (the sort that distributors can pick quotes out & plaster them on the video box) & even won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes while it was also nominated for the Golden Palm so surely Oldboy is a true classic? Well not for me it isn't since as I can't understand why it's so liked & I would go as far as to say I pretty much hated it apart from one or two isolated moments. For a start I couldn't get into the story at all, I just didn't like it as I thought it was slow & boring & while many out there would have you believe Oldboy has the bestest most shocking twist ever I thought it was rather plain & not very well executed either. The ending in which Dae-su goes to the New Zealand Alps to be hypnotised feels tagged on as well almost as if the makers wanted some sort of happy ending. At almost two hours I almost fell asleep I was so bored, the violence is tame & it's the thought of what's happening that I would imagine most people have a problem with rather than what is actually shown. In fact Oldboy has a very low body count of about seven & one mild sex scene, it's really not that graphic or memorable. I didn't warm to any of the character's & while I accept Oldboy has an alright concept & premise it fails to deliver & it's one film that I will never understand why so many people seem to like.

Based on a Japanese Manga of the same name Oldboy the film looks alright, there's one or two nice visual moments here although while everyone raves about the hallway fight that takes place in one continuous shot I was pretty unimpressed & thought the fight choreography was quite dull. The actual on-screen gore violence amounts to very little, Dae-su eats a live Octopus which is apparently quite normal in Korea anyway, there are some fight scenes, a severed hand, someones teeth are pulled out & there's a bit of blood at the end.

The budget was supposedly around the $4,000,000 mark which is actually a fair bit, filmed in South Korea & New Zealand. The acting looks alright but it's hard to tell when actors are speaking a different language.

Oldboy is a film that I found an absolute chore to sit through, I don't mind subtitled films or foreign films or paying attention to the plot as I followed the thing perfectly but I just didn't like any of it & it's as simple & straightforward as that. Apparently the second in director Choi-wook Park's revenge trilogy which also includes Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) & Lady Vengeance (2005).

I don't go to see a lot of movies anymore, despite the fact that when younger I would see easily 5 movies a week, two or three at the movies and the same in rentals.

Now, I usually only go to the theaters a few times a year for something special, and when I see an interesting DVD, I just buy it, I don't rent.

So, somehow I came across this film when reading things online and noticed a very high Rottentomatoes.com rating. (that should have told me something right there).

The "Kafkaesque" description intrigued me. A guy wakes up in a prison, everything is controlled, and literally years go by. He is framed for his wife's murder. Why? At first, the dubbing seemed distracting, a little too "bright", but I got used to it. In fact, right away, you could see a lot of effort when into the camera work for this film, and the music. It was compelling.

The story starts to slip when the guy gets out of the prison. First, this guy is hard to look at, just kind of wacky. He refuses to listen to another man (had he just been released too???) and when that man falls to his death, it is done for comic effect. I started thinking, uh oh.

Next, he meets a young woman and eats a live octopus. Not clear why. Perhaps a metaphor that those with the power will consume the lives of those that they can dominate. See, I remember film school too.

Anyways, the absurdity of why this guy was locked up, and who is really seeking revenge on who are plot details better left unsaid, but are actually quite disgusting. In fact, this movie is nothing like what I thought it would be.

I thought there would be a lot of stylized action. Either the director doesn't know how to stage action, or I don't know what. There could have been a great fight sequence at the beginning with the young punks, but the camera just turns away. Later, at the "big fight scene", Oh fights off literally dozens of guys with sticks, armed with only a hammer. There is no fight choreography, no real action, just a slow camera track. Oh is no fighter, but somehow beats up all on-comers, often not really connecting with them but they fall over anyways. At one point he is beaten down but just keeps going in a very odd fashion.

At another potential fight sequence, he is simply pushed down by another gangster, and cannot even coordinate standing back up again. By this time, I knew there was not going to be too much action by this guy.

This is not an action film. There is plenty of blood and guts, and the "twist ending" comes way before the end of the film. The lead character is so degraded, he begins to degrade himself. And when his ex-best friend laughs at how silly he behaves in his self-degradation, his laughing and attitude makes no connection to what he does to himself in the elevator a few minutes later. If this is all he had to live for, why not lock the guy up again? Here are the problems I have:

1) At some points, Oh can kill 50 people at once; the next scene, one guy can overpower him.

2) What's the point of the film? Incest is OK as long as you shut up about it?

3) Why would OH make the choice he did at the end, knowing who the girl is?

4) Doesn't a normal restaurant delivery service question bringing tons of food every day to a building that has rooms and screaming coming from it?

5) Wouldn't you eventually die after being gassed every night?

6) Hypnotism has limited powers, and only on people who WANT to be hypnotized. By now, everyone over the age of 10 knows that, so what was the deal here?

7) I don't buy films where the good guy or the bad guy are in some way omnipotent. Or where a character has to have chosen an exact path from a whole series of variables to arrive at the outcome that the other parties--and the script...are expecting. This was the problem with films such as Arlington Road, Seven, The Game, and dozens of other titles. I believe it is a result of lazy or untalented writing.

8) Never, ever go see a movie that Quentin Tarantino recommends!

So, if you thought this film might have great action, forget it. Martial arts fighting? No. A decent story? Uh uh. Nice shots of the mountains at the end? Yes.

Awesome Korean movie. I like the bit where he cut his tongue off

Fortunately, I haven't seen this film in a movie, big screen, just on a small screen on video. I doubt that I would have been able to sit through the film in a cinema and watch all the violence present in the film. After watching the first 30 minutes, I became both disappointed and curious.

Disappointed because of the hard to follow story line, the hardly understandable screens, the huge amount of aggression - I still don't know why I had been shown the Daesu (main character) pulling out raw the teeth of another person, his beastliness on women, him cutting out his tongue. And also curious, to see what will the film say as a conclusion, what is the ending summary of all this brutality.

Unfortunately, though the movie was not boring, I didn't get any answer to all these cruelty that I had to watch from the beginning to the end. To my opinion, if you want blood and want to laugh, there is Kill Bill 1-2, if you want blood with more meaning, you can take any recent war movie, and if you want an Eastern movie, there are much better titles out there. Afterwards I will take the ratings from the Cannes film festival with more precaution, as while Oldboy got a lot of praise from the jury, it had not much to say to me and had only 4/10 on my scale.

I am hungry to see something beautiful, harmonious, with true feelings and a clear message.