WHAT I LIKED: Park Chan-Wook's 'Oldboy,' is a film about a man called Dae-Su hunting down the people who captured and imprisoned him for fifteen years. What makes it different from your average genre movie though is that the prospect of finding the truth or getting revenge never seem like the light at the end of a tunnel for him.
Partly that's because we know Dae-Su never really had a life to return to, as he's firstly introduced drunkenly roaming the streets of Seoul on his daughter's birthday. But beyond that, the prospect of inner peace seems so far from how deranged he's played by Choi Min-sik, and his character's entire outlook is all about suppressing emotion - "laugh and the whole world laughs with you." He mostly looks like he's operating on autopilot, and the only real hope for him is offered by a woman called Mi-do (Kang Hye-Jung) whom he starts a relationship with, but even her feeble attempts to help him out of his pointless mission are futile.
He just keeps going, and when he does finally learn why he was captured, there's not only darkness at the end of the tunnel, but a truth that's far blacker than you'd probably have ever imagined. Apparently, when he was young, Dae-Su told people about a schoolfriend called Woo-Jin engaging in incest, so we learn that Woo-Jin was not only the guy who captured him years later, but it's also revealed that he hypnotised Dae-Su to fall in love with his own daughter - Mi-do.
It may be the most twisted way imaginable to get there, but what that does is bring Dae-Su to a place where he realises that love is what matters, and the final frames have him switch from his deranged smile to a more peaceful and earnest kind of laughter, and that journey ultimately seems to be what the film is all about.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: There's only so long you can spend hoping Dae-Su finds solace from his futile revenge mission, so unfortunately the enduring lack of humanity in him makes the film hard to stay engaged with.
That wouldn't be a problem were there other things to connect with of course, but the screenplay is not only devoid of any thematic depth; it also lacks much in-the-moment jeopardy or tension either.
Admittedly, when he's first imprisoned, the film does a brilliant job of keeping you guessing as to what's going on. But once he's out, the question of *why* he was captured never feels like it matters that much because it doesn't to the character. Instead, the focus is mostly on the bouts of extreme violence, and though Park Chan-Wook is clearly very gifted at choreographing a shot and a scene, the endless fight, rape and torture sequences are almost mind-numbing in their intensity.
VERDICT: Park Chan-Wook's 'Oldboy,' is a dark and twisted revenge movie where violence is extreme and solace always seems miles away for its central character.
