Oldboy (2003 film)


Oldboy is a 2003 South Korean neo-noir action thriller film co-written and directed by Park Chan-wook. It is based on the Japanese manga of the same name written by Garon Tsuchiya and illustrated by Nobuaki Minegishi. Oldboy is the second installment of The Vengeance Trilogy, preceded by Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and followed by Lady Vengeance.
The film follows the story of Oh Dae-su, who is imprisoned in a cell which resembles a hotel room for 15 years without knowing the identity of his captor or his captor's motives. When he is finally released, Dae-su finds himself still trapped in a web of conspiracy and violence. His own quest for vengeance becomes tied in with romance when he falls in love with an attractive young sushi chef, Mi-do.
The film won the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival and high praise from the President of the Jury, director Quentin Tarantino. The film has been well received by critics in the United States, with film critic Roger Ebert stating that Oldboy is a "powerful film not because of what it depicts, but because of the depths of the human heart which it strips bare". The film also received praise for its action sequences, most notably the single shot fight sequence. It has been listed among the best films of the 2000s in several publications.

Plot

In 1988, a businessman named Oh Dae-su is arrested for drunkenness, missing his daughter's fourth birthday. After his friend Joo-hwan picks him up from the police station, Dae-su is kidnapped and wakes up in a sealed hotel room, where food is delivered through a trap-door. Watching TV, Dae-su learns that his wife has been murdered and he is the prime suspect. He passes the time shadowboxing, planning revenge and attempting to dig a tunnel to escape.
Fifteen years pass since he was imprisoned. It is now 2003, a new century. Just before digging himself to freedom, Dae-su is sedated and hypnotized. He wakes up on a rooftop and sees a man on the ledge ready to jump to his death. The man asks him, "Even though I am no better than a beast, don't I have the right to live?" Dae-su leaves the man and tests his fighting skills on a group of thugs. Afterward, a mysterious beggar gives him money and a cell phone. Dae-su enters a sushi restaurant where he meets Mi-do, a young chef. He receives a taunting phone call from his captor, collapses, and is taken in by Mi-do. In a frenzy, Dae-su tries to force himself on Mi-Do in the bathroom of her apartment, however she is armed with a knife and successfully fends him off. Dae-su attempts to flee the apartment, but a sympathetic and intrigued Mi-do confronts him. Mi-do explains to Dae-su that she is romantically interested in him, but that they hardly know each other and she is not ready to be intimate. They reconcile and begin to form a bond. After he recovers, Dae-su tries to find his daughter and his former prison. Discovering that she was adopted, he gives up trying to contact her. He locates the Chinese restaurant that made his food and finds the prison by following a deliveryman. It is a private prison, where people can pay to have others incarcerated. Dae-su tortures the warden, Mr. Park, who reveals that Dae-su was imprisoned for "talking too much". He is then attacked by guards and stabbed but manages to defeat them.
Dae-su's captor is revealed to be a wealthy man named Lee Woo-jin. Woo-jin gives him an ultimatum: if Dae-su can uncover the motive for his imprisonment within five days, Woo-jin will kill himself. Otherwise, he will kill Mi-do. Dae-su and Mi-do get close and have sex. Meanwhile, Joo-hwan tries to contact Dae-su with important information but is murdered by Woo-jin. Dae-su eventually recalls that he and Woo-jin had gone to the same high school, and he had witnessed Woo-jin committing incest with his own sister. He told Joo-hwan what he had seen, which led to his classmates learning about it. Rumors spread and Woo-jin's sister killed herself, leading a grief-stricken Woo-jin to seek revenge. In present day, Woo-jin cuts off Mr. Park's hand, causing Mr. Park and his gang to join forces with Dae-su. Dae-su leaves Mi-do with Mr. Park and sets out to face Woo-jin.
At Woo-jin's penthouse, Woo-jin reveals that Mi-do is actually Dae-su's daughter. Woo-jin had orchestrated everything by using hypnosis to guide Dae-su to the restaurant, arranging for them to meet and fall in love so that Dae-su will experience the same pain of incest that he did. He reveals that Mr. Park is still working for him and threatens to tell the truth to Mi-do. Dae-su apologizes for his involvement in the death of Woo-jin's sister and humiliates himself by imitating a dog and begging. When Woo-jin is unimpressed, Dae-su cuts out his own tongue as a sign of penance. Woo-jin finally accepts Dae-su's apology and tells Mr. Park to hide the truth from Mi-do. He then drops the device he claimed was the remote to his pacemaker and begins walking away. Dae-su activates the device to kill him, only to find it is actually a remote for loudspeakers, which play an audio recording of Mi-do and Dae-su having sex. As Dae-su collapses in despair, Woo-jin enters the elevator, recalls his sister's suicide, and shoots himself in the head.
Some time later, Dae-su finds the hypnotist to erase his knowledge of Mi-do being his daughter so that they can stay happy together. To persuade her, he repeats the question he heard from the man on the rooftop, and the hypnotist agrees. Afterward, Mi-do finds Dae-su lying in snow but there are no signs of the hypnotist, leaving it ambiguous if Dae-su really met her. Mi-do confesses her love for him and the two embrace. Dae-su breaks into a wide smile, which is then slowly replaced by a look of pain.

Cast

The corridor fight scene took seventeen takes in three days to perfect and was one continuous take; there was no editing of any sort except for the knife that was stabbed in Oh Dae-su's back, which was computer-generated imagery.
The script originally called for full male frontal nudity, but Yoo Ji-tae changed his mind after the scenes had been shot.
Other computer-generated imagery in the film includes the ant coming out of Dae-su's arm and the ants crawling over him afterwards. The octopus being eaten alive was not computer-generated; four were used during the making of this scene. Actor Choi Min-sik, a Buddhist, said a prayer for each one. The eating of squirming octopuses as a delicacy exists in East Asia, although it is usually killed and cut, not eaten whole and alive. Usually the nerve activity in the octopus' tentacles makes the pieces still squirm posthumously on the plate when served. When asked in DVD commentary if he felt sorry for Choi, director Park Chan-wook stated he felt more sorry for the octopus.
The final scene's snowy landscape was filmed in New Zealand. The ending is deliberately ambiguous, and the audience is left with several questions: specifically, how much time has passed, if Dae-Su's meeting with the hypnotist really took place, whether he successfully lost the knowledge of Mi-do's identity, and whether he will continue his relationship with Mi-do. In an interview with Park, he says that the ambiguous ending was deliberate and intended to generate discussion; it is completely up to each individual viewer to interpret what isn't shown.

Reception

Critical response

Oldboy received generally positive reviews from critics. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 82% based on 147 reviews with an average rating of 7.38/10. The site's consensus is "Violent and definitely not for the squeamish, Park Chan-Wook's visceral Oldboy is a strange, powerful tale of revenge." Metacritic gives the film an average score of 77 out of 100, based on 32 reviews.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four out of four stars. Ebert remarked: "We are so accustomed to 'thrillers' that exist only as machines for creating diversion that it's a shock to find a movie in which the action, however violent, makes a statement and has a purpose." James Berardinelli of ReelViews gave the film three out of four stars, saying that it "isn't for everyone, but it offers a breath of fresh air to anyone gasping on the fumes of too many traditional Hollywood thrillers."
Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com praised the film, calling it "anguished, beautiful, and desperately alive" and "a dazzling work of pop-culture artistry." Peter Bradshaw gave it 5/5 stars, commenting that this is the first time in which he could actually identify with a small live octopus. Bradshaw summarizes his review by referring to Oldboy as "cinema that holds an edge of cold steel to your throat." David Dylan Thomas points out that rather than simply trying to "gross us out", Oldboy is "much more interested in playing with the conventions of the revenge fantasy and taking us on a very entertaining ride to places that, conceptually, we might not want to go." Sean Axmaker of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer gave Oldboy a score of "B-", calling it "a bloody and brutal revenge film immersed in madness and directed with operatic intensity," but felt that the questions raised by the film are "lost in the battering assault of lovingly crafted brutality."
MovieGazette lists 10 features on its "It's Got" list for Oldboy and summarizes its review of Oldboy by saying, "Forget ‘The Punisher’ and ‘Man on Fire’ – this mesmerising revenger’s tragicomedy shows just how far-reaching the tentacles of mad vengeance can be." MovieGazette also comments that it "needs to be seen to be believed." Jamie Russell of the BBC movie review calls it a "sadistic masterpiece that confirms Korea's current status as producer of some of the world's most exciting cinema." Manohla Dargis of the New York Times gave a lukewarm review, saying that "there is not much to think about here, outside of the choreographed mayhem." J.R. Jones of the Chicago Reader was also not impressed, saying that "there's a lot less here than meets the eye."
In 2008, Oldboy was placed 64th on an Empire list of the top 500 movies of all time. The same year, voters on CNN named it one of the ten best Asian films ever made. It was ranked #18 in the same magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema" in 2010. In a 2016 BBC poll, critics voted the film the 30th greatest since 2000. In 2020, The Guardian ranked it number 3 among the classics of modern South Korean Cinema.

''Oedipus the King'' inspiration

Park Chan-wook stated that he named the main character Oh Dae-su "to remind the viewer of Oedipus." In one of the film's iconic shots, Yoo Ji-tae, who played Woo-jin, strikes an extraordinary yoga pose. Park Chan-wook said he designed this pose to convey "the image of Apollo." It was Apollo's prophecy that revealed Oedipus' fate in Sophocles' Oedipus the King. The link to Oedipus Rex is only a minor element in most English-language criticism of the movie, while Koreans have made it a central theme. Sung Hee Kim wrote "Family seen through Greek tragedy and Korean movie – Oedipus the King and Old Boy." Kim Kyungae offers a different analysis, with Dae-su and Woo-jin both representing Oedipus. Besides the theme of unknown incest revealed, Oedipus gouges his eyes out to avoid seeing a world that despises the truth, while Oh Dae-su cuts off his tongue to avoid revealing the truth to his world.
More parallels with Greek tragedy include the fact that Lee Woo-jin looks relatively young as compared to Oh Dae-su when they are supposed to be contemporaries at school, which makes Lee Woo-jin look like an immortal Greek god whereas Oh Dae-su is merely an aged mortal. Indeed, throughout the movie Lee Woo-jin is portrayed as an obscenely rich young man who lives in a lofty tower and is omnipresent due to having placed ear bugs on Oh Dae-Su and others, which again furthers the parallel between his character and the secrecy of Greek gods.
One could also mention Mido, who throughout the movie comes across as a strong-willed, young and innocent girl, which is not too far from Sophocles' Antigone, Oedipus' daughter, who, though she does not commit incest with her father, remains faithful and loyal to him which reminds us of the bittersweet ending where Mido reunites with Oh Dae-Su and takes care of him in the wilderness. Another interesting character is the hypnotist, who, apart from being able to hypnotise people, also has the power to make people fall in love, which is characteristic of the power of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, whose classic act is to make Paris and Helen fall in love before and during the Trojan War.

Box office performance

In South Korea, the film was seen by 3,260,000 filmgoers and ranks fifth for the highest-grossing film of 2003.
It grossed a total of US$14,980,005 worldwide.

Awards and nominations

AwardCategoryNomineeResult
Asia Pacific Film FestivalBest DirectorPark Chan-wook
Asia Pacific Film FestivalBest ActorChoi Min-sik
Austin Film Critics AssociationBest Film
Austin Film Critics AssociationBest Foreign Film
Bangkok International Film FestivalBest Film
Bangkok International Film FestivalBest Director Park Chan-wook
Belgian Film Critics AssociationGrand Prix
Bergen International Film FestivalAudience Award
Blue Dragon Film AwardsBest DirectorPark Chan-wook
Blue Dragon Film AwardsBest ActorChoi Min-sik
Blue Dragon Film AwardsBest Supporting ActressKang Hye-jung
British Independent Film AwardsBest Foreign Independent Film
Cannes Film FestivalPalme d'Or
Cannes Film FestivalGrand Prix
Chicago Film Critics AssociationBest Foreign Language Film
Critics' Choice Movie AwardBest Foreign Language Film
Director's Cut AwardsBest DirectorPark Chan-wook
Director's Cut AwardsBest ActorChoi Min-sik
Director's Cut AwardsBest ProducerKim Dong-joo
European Film AwardsBest Non-European FilmPark Chan-wook
Golden Trailer AwardsBest Foreign Action Trailer
Grand Bell AwardsBest Film
Grand Bell AwardsBest DirectorPark Chan-wook
Grand Bell AwardsBest ActorChoi Min-sik
Grand Bell AwardsBest New ActressKang Hye-jung
Grand Bell AwardsBest Adapted ScreenplayPark Chan-wook
Grand Bell AwardsBest CinematographyChung Chung-hoon
Grand Bell AwardsBest EditingKim Sang-bum
Grand Bell AwardsBest Art DirectionRyu Seong-hee
Grand Bell AwardsBest LightingPark Hyun-won
Grand Bell AwardsBest MusicJo Yeong-wook
Grand Bell AwardsBest Visual EffectsLee Jeon-hyeong, Shin Jae-ho, Jeong Do-an
Hong Kong Film AwardsBest Asian Film
Korean Film AwardsBest Film
Korean Film AwardsBest DirectorPark Chan-wook
Korean Film AwardsBest ActorChoi Min-sik
Korean Film AwardsBest ActressKang Hye-jung
Korean Film AwardsBest Supporting ActressYoon Jin-seo
Korean Film AwardsBest CinematographyChung Chung-hoon
Korean Film AwardsBest EditingKim Sang-bum
Korean Film AwardsBest Art DirectionRyu Seong-hee
Korean Film AwardsBest MusicJo Yeong-wook
Korean Film AwardsBest Sound
Online Film Critics SocietyBest Foreign Language Film
Saturn AwardsBest Action or Adventure Film
Saturn AwardsBest DVD or Blu-ray Special Edition ReleaseUltimate Collector's Edition
Sitges Film FestivalBest Film
Sitges Film FestivalJosé Luis Guarner Critic's Award
Stockholm International Film FestivalAudience Award

Soundtrack

Nearly all the music cues that are composed by Shim Hyeon-jeong, Lee Ji-soo and Choi Seung-hyun are titled after films, many of them film noirs.
; Track listing

Remakes

Controversy over ''Zinda''

Zinda, the Bollywood film directed by writer-director Sanjay Gupta, also bears a striking resemblance to Oldboy but is not an officially sanctioned remake. It was reported in 2005 that Zinda was under investigation for violation of copyright. A spokesman for Show East, the distributor of Oldboy, said, "If we find out there's indeed a strong similarity between the two, it looks like we'll have to talk with our lawyers."

American film remake

originally intended to make a version of the movie starring Will Smith in 2008. He commissioned screenwriter Mark Protosevich to work on the adaptation. Spielberg pulled out of the project in 2009.
An American remake directed by Spike Lee was released on 27 November 2013.