Spike Lee’s ‘Oldboy’ Remake Merely Echoes Superior Original

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Rating: 1.5/5.0

After years in development hell, Spike Lee’s remake of Park Chan-wook’s beloved “Oldboy” is finally here. Does it live up to the high expectations set by the original? Does it mark a return to form from the director of some of the most important movies of his era or is it another disappointment? No and no. Sadly, what’s so remarkable about “Oldboy,” especially when one considers the darkness of its themes and graphic violence, is that it’s just so forgettable. It’s an echo of Park’s film and will be quickly dismissed in the legacy of its director.

Joe Doucett (Josh Brolin) is a prick. He’s a drunk who forgets plans with his daughter, screws up business deals by hitting on the client’s girlfriend, and generally seems like the kind of guy you’d avoid at a bar. Joe stumbles around the world, barely keeping alcoholism in check and burning bridges left and right. One late night, after trying to get bar owner friend Chucky (Michael Imperioli) to open for one more drink and failing, Joe is kidnapped. He’s thrown in what looks like a cheap hotel room but is actually a prison cell run in a high-profile, highly-secretive building operated by Chaney (Samuel L. Jackson). While he’s imprisoned, his wife is brutally murdered and Joe is framed for the crime. He spends the next twenty years in that room, being fed dumplings through the door and watching Kung Fu movies. And then he’s let go.

Oldboy
Photo credit: Film District

After his release, Joe becomes obsessed with figuring out who took the last two decades of his life. As with the original, the key to “Oldboy” is about asking the right questions. It’s not who wronged you that matters. It’s why. And why they let you go. Whereas Park allowed these themes to emerge from the narrative, Lee and writer Mark Protosevich hammer viewers over the head with them. Protosevich’s script for “Oldboy” is so frustrating in how self-aware it is of both the original and the themes with which it plays, making it always feel like a movie more than a story with characters with whom we can relate. It’s constantly calling back to the original (“Hey, remember this?!?!”) while drawing attention to how it’s different and highlighting, underlining, and bolding its themes. It never develops its own rhythm or reason to exist.

And then there’s the cast. Brolin is actually quite good, as he always is, especially in relation to the physical demands of the role, but the film truly goes off the rails when Sharlto Copley appears as the villainous Adrian. Brolin and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (“Shame,” “12 Years a Slave”) seem to be striving for something gritty and genuine in their performance and the film’s aesthetic which makes Copley’s ridiculously mannered, goofily-accented performance all the more annoying. As if he came from the set of another film, Copley plays Adrian like a Hammer villain, mistaking the elegant approach of Ji-tae Yu in the original as something more exaggerated. Elizabeth Olsen fares better as Marie Sebastian, the girl who comes to Joe’s aid, but the part here feels even more underwritten than in the original.

More than most remakes, it feels like those involved with the production of Spike Lee’s “Oldboy” never got a handle on why they were updating the original. It’s certainly not a shot-for-shot remake like Van Sant’s “Psycho” but it also doesn’t have enough of its own personality to feel like a distinct film in its own right. It doesn’t stand on its own. Everything that works about it feels like a callback to the original, like a cover band in a bar singing a song for which they have no direct, emotional relation to the lyrics. Some of the inherent power of the storytelling of Park’s version remains intact but not enough to justify its existence.

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com