Oldboy

It's a movie that you feel you're not so much watching on screen as having beamed directly into your skull from some malign, alien planet of horror.

This hunt for revenge is really a quest for self-discovery. The story, acting and brilliant directing elevate Oldboy into a human struggle to know yourself and your place in the universe, and to live with that sometimes terrible knowledge.

As always with Park Chanwook, you just hold on and let him rip.

Obviously, this sort of taboo-flouting imagery isn't for everyone, but Park's vision is all of a piece.

This nightmarish revenge drama from Korea is grueling, intense, cruel -- the very definition of extreme cinema.

Oldboy has the fatal air of wanting so desperately to be a cult movie that it forgets to present itself as a coherent one.

Put simply, in my humble opinion, Oldboy sucks.

I could say that Shiri, Nowhere to Hide and The Island were my entry into South Korean cinema. But Old Boy was the film that undoubtedly opened my eyes and convinced me that something very big was brewing in that country in terms of cinematographic quality. I remember leaving the cinema in Granada and thinking that I had never seen anything as visceral and authentic. Pure, violent cinema, very close to its characters and with a captivating artistic finish. Old Boy is an unforgettable experience and a milestone in the history of recent cinema.

The film has good shots, colors, and ideas, but the plot is very heavy and the culture is unclear, and the main character is vile until the very end.

A Korean action-suspense flick that, like many far-east thrillers, doesn't hesitate to take things well into the realm of the taboo. In a lot of ways that's a blast of fresh air, as no doubt an American version wouldn't have been half as biting, daring or dark, and its dedication to probing the unacceptable makes up a large part of Oldboy's character. It's not those stabs outside the boundaries that bothered me about this one, though, so much as it was the refusal to bask in them for more than a few moments before jolting off in search of new depths. The establishing story is almost perfect, setting the stage with an everyman who's been transformed by fifteen years of unexplained imprisonment, then following his violent, dedicated search for both suspect and reason. It's an act the tangled, overstretched follow-through can't hope to match, even when its mysteries and motivations are finally, confusingly, lain bare. Oldboy deserves recognition for its style, demeanor and intense action scenes, but the plot often veers into weirdness and depravity for unclear reasons which don't always benefit the bigger picture.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

I hate this movie with a burning passion and I can't understand why anyone would enjoy watching this. It seems like an exercise in masochism from the director (a director who, btw, has given me one of my favorite movies of all time!) or an exercise in sadism from the viewer.