Oldboy (2003)
| director: | Park Chan-wook |
| release-year: | 2003 |
| genres: | thriller, psychological |
| countries: | Korea |
| languages: | Korean |
Korean Memento, more or less. Oh Dae-su, our loud-mouthed drunken lead, is mysteriously kidnapped off of a rainy street and locked in a hotel room for 15 years with nary a word of explanation before being unceremoniously dumped back on the street.
He arms himself with a whacking hammer and goes on an exciting manga-inspired comedy-action mission of discovery and revenge. With nothing more than memories of the fried dumplings he was served every day for the last decade, he has to hammer his way through the mystery of who kidnapped him, and why. It's an important stylistic decision that this be a world mostly without guns; we wouldn't get ridiculous single-shot hammer-man vs forty-people-with-sticks hallway escapades if the street gangs were armed.
He is mighty weird, from over a decade of extreme isolation. He meets a lady sushi chef who is even weirder than he, sort of teams up with her, and sort of falls in love.
After determinedly whacking his way to the top, he finally reaches the rich business executive who he once slighted inadvertently in high school when he witnessed a bit of awkward but willing incest. One man forgot the whole thing immediately, the other held a life-long murderous grudge.
Oh Dae-su wraps up the mystery nicely for us, and then Richie Rich asks him, "yeah, but why do you think I let you whack your way to the top?" Whoopsie doopsie, there was a hypnotist carefully puppetmastering him through the whole revenge rampage. Some people were brutally mangled for nothing, I guess.
It was all a gloriously complex scheme to get Oh Dae-su to have his own incestuous transgression, even though he was entirely unaware of it and doing so outside of his own self-control, so not really sure that this is valid eye-for-an-eye. Richie Rich isn't so sure, either, and everybody ends unhappy (and/or dead).
A mere 10 years later, Spike Lee (?) teamed up with Josh Brolin and the non-twin Olsen sister (?) for an exceedingly ill-advised American remake. Really missed an opportunity to include MC Hammer.
