We’re at a point in history in which the American public has grown increasingly bored with what Hollywood has to offer. Our market is saturated with comic book crossover duds, hackneyed shock horror, and an infinitely recursive and annoying cycle of uninspired Meet the Fockers-type sequels. Yet here we are, camped in front of our televisions and demanding to be entertained. It’s at a time like this that a film like Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy demands our attention. This twisted story of love and revenge is the perfect film to pull a movie addict out of the holiday movie lineup-induced depression.
Oldboy tells the story of Oh Dae-su, a Korean man who is abducted and imprisoned for 15 years with no hint as to who has abducted him, where he is, or why he is there. With nothing but a television and some notepads to occupy his time, Oh Dae-su becomes obsessed with discovering who has taken his life away from him and exacting his revenge upon them. He uses his fifteen years of incarceration to perfect his boxing, and to write down the names of all the people he has wronged in his lifetime. The list grows and grows, but Oh Dae-su never finds the answer he is looking for.
Until one day when Dae-su wakes up a free man. He befriends a woman name Mi-do at a sushi bar and, because of Oh Dae-su’s lack of female companionship for fifteen years and because of some unexplainable force pulling them together, the two quickly become lovers. Though the two know they are working from inside the trap laid by Oh Dae-su’s captor, together they unravel the mystery of his incarceration.
I’ll quit describing Oldboy’s plot line now because the movie ends in a series of twists that would impress even M. Night Shamalan himself. What makes Oldboy truly special is that Park doesn’t need imaginary monsters, everyday men with superhuman powers, or cheap tricks to pull off one awe-inspiringly disturbing ending. Oldboy is fueled by its characters’ obsessions with vengeance against those that have wronged them, an all-too-human emotion that we can all relate to. Only in real life we learn to forgive and forget; in Chan-wook Park’s romp through the seedy underbelly of Seoul, people learn to forgive using the business end of a claw hammer.
