Oldboy (2013)
Not that Lee's film is that great, it's just that I was turned off by Park's overly-saturated film. Lee tells the same story, but in a leaner, crisper Hollywood style. I think this accounts for why I like margarine better than real butter.
The story is almost exactly the same: a drunken businessman (Josh Brolin), who just blew an account by hitting on his prospective client's wife, gets rip-roaring drunk and is talking to a woman with a yellow umbrella. The next thing he knows he's in a motel room, except he can't get out. He's regularly fed (mostly Chinese dumplings) and watches TV, enough to know that his ex-wife was murdered and he's the prime suspect.
He's kept for twenty years, and is finally let go (the image of him climbing out of a trunk in the middle of a field is pretty arresting). He befriends a young medic (Elizabeth Olsen) and tries to piece together who held him and why. His trail leads him to a place where people are kidnapped and imprisoned for a fee (I find it amusing that this sort of business could exist), managed by a garishly-dressed Samuel L. Jackson.
Eventually he finds out who did it and why, and it's the same as the original film, but I had forgotten it so it was like new (the advantage of getting absent-minded).
Brolin makes a good taciturn hero. I have no idea what it's like to be kept alone for twenty years, but I think Brolin captures it. The scene in which he marches into the hotel set-up armed with only a hammer is pretty good and intense. Lee did unfortunately keep in a scene in which Brolin fights about twenty guys and beats them all, because he trained in his cell, you know. Why weren't any of these guys packing a gun? It kind of makes me mad.
For all of Lee's missteps in this century Oldboy was a pleasant surprise. I know I'm probably the only person on the planet to feel this way, even Lee, whose original cut was about an hour longer. But I found it briskly paced and missing nothing essential.
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