A well-worn but dependable maxim frequently cited by Roger Ebert is that the most effective way to critique a film is to make another, better one. Coming appropriately from Fran??ois Truffaut, a leading director in the French New Wave and originator of the auteur theory who started out writing passionate film reviews, this has been constantly proven true.
The recent releases of James Wan's \Saw"" and Takashi Miike's ""Ichi the Killer"" are adequate movies which beg to be improved by another movie. Park Chanwook's strikingly original, grueling ""Oldboy"" fulfills this yearning.
""Oldboy"" is the first darkly atmospheric, post-Fincher urban thriller worth a damn. Park successfully made a relentlessly violent psychodrama, one that after it achieves cult status, should open the floodgates to more satisfyingly sinister imports.
""Oldboy"" begins with a hilarious pretitle sequence, which involves the slightly chubby, drunken Oh Dae-su (Min-sik Choi) making mischief at a police station on the night of his daughter's birthday. Suddenly, Oh Dae-su is next seen imprisoned in a dingy motel room, with a television and a daily feeding of potstickers as his only remaining vestige of human interaction. Fifteen years pass and time transforms Dae-su wholesale; social deprivation efficiently rips apart a man and creates another one anew.
One day, Oh Dae-su is released without warning or reason-determined to unleash his stewing bloodlust on those responsible for his puzzling incarceration. The quest, however, evolves into a sadistic cat-and-mouse game with dreadful, devastating, consequences.
The key to enjoyment of this aggressively offbeat film lies in how deeply a viewer becomes ingrained into Park's twisted logic; it builds to a ferociously audacious denouement of Shakespearean proportions. Park's conclusion is dazzlingly enigmatic and rife with brutal irony, but takes the film to the extremes of Greek tragedy, a confident move that eschews revenge movie norms all the while risking criticism for its plausibility.
""Oldboy"" is unconfined by its genre, exhibiting a wicked playfulness with the arrival of scene after visceral scene while prepping revelations for a wrenching emotional climax.
By turns cheerfully sadistic and freakishly funny, the tumultuous road to clarity in ""Oldboy"" is compelling and often disturbing. Performances from Choi, Gang Hye-Jung, and Yoo Ji-Tae are uniformly wonderful.
Choi, Hye-Jung, and Ji-Tae inject an ample sense of humanity into Park's showy genre cocktail, edging it toward the brink of transcendence. It doesn't quite get there. Park's occasional quirky flourishes are superfluous and distracting, often serving only to unintentionally confuse.
However, warts and all, ""Oldboy"" announces the arrival of a talented director with an irrefutable ingenuity for the macabre. Park mixes genres with ease and panache, and his complex structuring exudes a certain cockeyed genius. The similar ""Saw"" and ""Ichi the Killer"" pale in comparison to ""Oldboy,"" with Park's achievement putting them to shame more profoundly than even the most articulate review could.
While definitely not for the squeamish, ""Oldboy"" is an adventurous adrenaline boost into this year's crop of cinema. Praised emphatically by jury head Quentin Tarantino at the Cannes Film Festival last year (where it received the Grand Jury Prize), this film has been propelled by enthusiastic word-of-mouth into an American release and is poised for immediate cult status.
If Park Chanwook's next film delivers on the substantial promise ""Oldboy"" shows, he could develop from a skilled provocateur into a full-fledged cinematic icon.
