There’s a scene in the first part of director Park Chan-Wook’s Vengeance trilogy, 2002’s Vengeance is Mine, (weirdly retitled Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance for western markets) where the father of a kidnapped daughter is asked if he has any enemies. His reply is, “I always thought I lived an honest life,” to which the cynical cop replies “That’s what they all say.” Well, not in Oldboy it isn’t. The second part of the Vengeance trilogy arrived a year after Mr. Vengeance and with it, Park’s international reputation was secured. Twenty years on, this Korean adaptation of Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi’s manga of the same name still has lessons to teach Hollywood about using comic books for inspiration. Brutal, violent and grim without being self-consciously “dark” or humorless, fast-moving and sometimes goofy without being campy and lightweight, more than any comic book movie with the possible exception of Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World, Oldboy translates the virtues of the two-dimensional drawn-and-written page to the screen in a way that feels entirely cinematic.
The plot, in Oldboy and its source material – but fatally altered in both Spike Lee’s 2013 Hollywood remake and Sanjay Gupta’s unofficial Hindi version, Zinda – has the macabre, amoral elegance of a Jacobean revenge drama. Oh Dae-su (a bravura performance by Choi Min-sik) is abducted by an unknown assailant and imprisoned for 15 years, and then abruptly released. During his long imprisonment in a hotel-like room, Oh only has contact with the outside world via television, where he learns of the major world events of the time, but also, a few months into his incarceration, that his wife has been murdered and that he is the prime suspect. Eventually released in a case on top of a building, Oh finds himself in new clothes and, making his way into the city streets is soon given a wallet full of money and a cellphone by a man who tells him it’s pointless to ask any questions. He then embarks on a violent rampage to find out who kept him prisoner, and as the plot unfolds, he meets and falls in love with a young waitress, Mi-do (Kang Hye-jung), who helps him in his investigations and they find that Oh’s infant daughter was sent abroad and is being raised in Sweden. Meanwhile Oh Dae-su’s captor (Yoo Ji-tae) gets in touch and, revealing himself to be a wealthy businessman, offers Oh a deal. If Oh can uncover the motivation for his imprisonment within five days, his captor will kill himself. If not, he will kill Mi-do.
With the help of an old school friend, No Joo-hwan (Ji Dae-han), Oh Dae-su and Mi-do discover that the businessman is Woo-jin, another alumnus of the Catholic school that Dae-su and Joo-hwan attended. Though at first, he has no memory of Lee, it transpires that, on Oh Dae-su’s last day at that school, he witnessed Lee and his sister Soo-ah (Yoon Jin-seo) having sex. He told Joo-hwan, left the school and never thought of it again. But in the meantime, Joo-hwan spread the story, ruining Soo-ah’s reputation. Believing that she was pregnant by her brother, Soo-ah then committed suicide by throwing herself from a dam.
Leaving Mi-do in safety – or so he believes – Oh Dae-su tracks down Lee Woo-jin to his luxurious apartment and there Lee reveals to him that he has been monitoring and orchestrating Oh’s actions far more than he has realized. As Lee explains, Mi-do and Oh’s meeting was no accident; the couple were both subjected to post-hypnotic suggestion and Mi-do is actually Oh’s daughter. In addition, far from being safe as he imagined, Mi-do is now Lee’s prisoner and his men are poised to tell her the news about her real relationship with Oh Dae-su. Horrified and outraged, Oh threatens, cajoles and eventually begs Lee not to tell Mi-do the truth. After Oh abases himself, begs forgiveness and eventually cuts out his own tongue with scissors, Lee relents, tells his men not to let Mi-do know, then disappears into an elevator, relives the death of his sister, in which he played a part, and shoots himself. Free, Oh Dae-su tracks down the hypnotist who worked for Lee Woo-jin, persuades her to wipe Lee’s revelations from his memory and the movie ends with the couple reunited, in one of the strangest and most ambiguous happy endings in cinematic history.
There are many more details and nuances to the storyline, but that’s basically it, and though it functions extremely well as a violent man-on-a-mission thriller, it’s not exactly Die Hard. The hero is far from heroic – we have only a few glimpses of Oh Dae-su’s previous life, but it’s made abundantly clear that at best the man is an asshole, and always has been. We sympathize with him anyway—up to a point at least—both because of the plight in which he finds himself, and because of Choi Min-sik’s superb, eccentric charismatic performance and screen presence. The villain is definitely a villain, but he’s not easy to hate; in its own quiet way, Yoo Ji-tae’s performance is as much of a tour-de-force as Choi’s and allows the viewer to overlook the fact that, however much prison ages a man, Lee could not have been at high school at the same time as Oh Dae-su. Mi-do is a less rounded character than either of the male leads, but Kang Hye-jung fills it out with a performance that ranges from warm and vulnerable to tough and even slightly creepy.
In comparison with most comic book movies—and there are many, many more around now than in 2003—Oldboy is at an advantage because it doesn’t just borrow characters and put them into a standard action movie plot, it adapts a story. That story is cinematic, but Park doesn’t just transpose it from one medium to another. Instead, he looks at the storytelling techniques that make the manga work on the page, and, without recourse to cheesy stylistic approximations of comic book panels on the screen (aside from one fun example), he borrows the kind of jumpy, kinetic energy that generally only belongs to still pictures that are supposed to be read quickly in sequence. That’s an important point, because it’s the spirit of comics that allows Oldboy to victoriously transcend the many and various implausibilities and outrages of its plot in a way which, for instance, Spike Lee’s more prosaic remake, compromised by its Hollywood sensibilities, does not. It’s tempting to say that the Hollywood version is sanitized, but it’s a strange kind of cleansing that allows works of fiction to depict gut-wrenching torture and assault with a hammer but draws the line at accidental incest. In fact, a comparison between the two films highlights the sense of carefully-weighted balance that makes Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy so watchable and again, so reminiscent of renaissance revenge drama.
Oldboy was one of the movies responsible for attracting the world’s attention to South Korean cinema, perhaps because, in comparison to Mr. Vengeance and Park Chan-wook’s 2000 breakthrough film JSA (Joint Security Area) it isn’t obviously Korean in style or content. Whereas JSA focused on the tensions between South Korea and communist North Korea and the backdrop to Mr. Vengeance was the contemporary economic situation in South Korea, Oldboy focusses firmly on its protagonist and his mission. The setting seems to be Seoul, and the TV news that Oh Dae-su watches rushes the viewer through 15 years of South Korean history, but it could be any modern city, and there’s something distinctively Japanese about the ferocity of the violence which carries over from the source material.
That said, the movie’s atmosphere, despite Park’s debt to stylists like Hitchcock and Brian de Palma, is emotional and sometimes romantic, far less cold and gloating than contemporary and in-some-ways comparable Japanese movies like Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer. When Oldboy was embraced by western critics and moviegoers in 2003, Hollywood took notice. But while the cinema of the west was all too ready to accept the balletic brutality of Park’s vision – much as it had with the “heroic bloodshed” of John Woo’s movies back in the ‘90s – the transgressive and slippery morality that characterizes all three of Park’s Vengeance trilogy and makes the films so much more than simple thrillers, was less easily absorbed.
Crucially, in the case of Oldboy—easily the most commercial film of the Vengeance trilogy —that complex ambiguity is everything. Lee Woo-jin, the movie’s villain, is mild-mannered, sensitive and thoughtful where Oh Dae-su is crude and impulsive. His punishment of Oh is extreme and horrific—and arguably misogynistic—but it is also logical. For most of the film’s running time, Oh Dae-su believes that he is seeking revenge for his imprisonment, but he is mistaken on two counts. Firstly, it is Lee who is truly seeking vengeance, and secondly the imprisonment wasn’t itself the punishment, it was simply a necessary means to an end, which is why, relatively speaking, Oh was treated humanely during his incarceration.
Lee is intensely cruel, but he is not unreasonable. He fully accepts that Oh’s offense was committed thoughtlessly and without any personal malice, but at the same time he insists on Oh’s responsibility for the consequences of his words. In telling his friend what he had seen, a series of events was set in motion which quickly spiraled out of control and of which Oh Dae-su – which somehow makes it worse – was never aware. It is this characteristic lack of forethought and consideration which shapes Oh’s punishment.
Unlike his opponent, Oh Dae-su seems solely to live in the moment; he never pauses to wonder about his relationship with the young and fragile Mi-do, even when it becomes obvious that his antagonist is watching the couple and orchestrating events. Similarly, he is theoretically seeking revenge, but his dead wife and missing daughter are never mentioned by Oh himself. In fact, after he’s freed there’s only one scene where he shows any kind of emotion for them; a shot of his face in a strange grimace after Mi-do excitedly talks about visiting his wife’s grave. After this, Oh Dae-su is focused only on his mission and, when it occurs to him, Mi-do.
That said, despite his crudeness, Oh is not unintelligent. Towards the film’s climax he comes up with a plausible if mistaken motivation for Lee’s sadism. Realizing that, despite reports that Lee’s sister Soo-ah had gone alone to a dam and thrown herself into the water, there is a photograph on Lee’s wall of Soo-ah at the dam, taken on that date, he concludes that Lee must have murdered his sister, fearing that the news that she was pregnant would ruin his future. After she was dead, the revelation that it was a phantom pregnancy and he had killed her for nothing filled him with a bitter desire for revenge. It makes sense, it would even be a pretty good plot, but Lee Woo-jin – who is certainly enough of a villain to have done it – is unimpressed; it’s a typical Oh Dae-su, small-minded idea and he treats it with the impatience it deserves.
When Lee finally reveals the full extent of his punishment – that Oh has inadvertently slept with – and perhaps worse, become romantically involved with – his own daughter, there is a real sense of justice, however warped and unfair to Mi-do it might be, being served. One of the film’s most uncomfortable scenes is also one of its most characteristic. Oh Dae-su abases and humiliates himself while begging Lee not to reveal to Mi-du the reality of their relationship, and Lee, though visibly amused by Oh’s plight, even as he cuts his own tongue out with scissors, is not entirely unsympathetic. After failing to kill both himself and Oh, which seems always to have been his ultimate intention, he agrees to leave Mi-do her innocence, before walking away. As if to test Oh’s character one last time, Lee leaves behind the remote control that he earlier claimed controls his pacemaker. When Oh predictably tries to use it, he activates a recording of his night of passion with Mi-do. Lee’s revenge is complete and as he leaves in the elevator we see the truth of Soo-ah’s death scene. Lee was with her at the dam, she did deliberately fall to her death and although Woo-jin tried to stop her, he ultimately let her fall. We can’t be sure whether Lee let her go on purpose or simply couldn’t hold on any longer, but either way, the scene’s almost operatic atmosphere of doomed romance – heightened, moments later by Lee’s suicide – is emotionally far removed from the scenario that Oh Dae-su outlined earlier. Similarly, the viewer can never really be sure whether Lee Woo-jin ever intended to punish Mi-do or whether he was – which seems unlikely – genuinely swayed by Oh Dae-su’s self-mutilation.
That ambiguity becomes even stronger in the movie’s weirdly dreamlike closing scenes. Oh Dae-su, looking possibly older, possibly just ravaged by his experiences, tracks down the hypnotist who Lee Woo-jin had employed to manipulate Oh and Mi-du and asks her to program him so that he doesn’t remember that Mi-do is his daughter. She agrees and the hypnotism takes place – why not? – amid snowy mountain scenery where, shortly thereafter, Mi-do mysteriously finds him. As the film closes, they embrace, looking out at the beautiful mountain scenery and we see Oh Dae-su’s broad smile turn into an anguished grimace. Did the hypnotism not work? Does he somehow have a feeling of wrongness just as they both had an initial feeling of recognition? Is it just the release of pain after a long ordeal? We can never know. As Park Chan-wook explained in a commentary on the movie, he leaves it for the audience to decide whether it’s a happy-unhappy ending, an unhappy-happy ending, romantic, immoral and disgusting, or something else entirely.
That ending and that ambiguity is a key to the movie’s unforgettable power. In its quest for a less problematic viewing experience, the Hollywood Oldboy robs its characters and story of any emotional truth or depth. Without the parallel incest plots and the precise ways in which they work out, Lee Woo-jin becomes a one-dimensional sadist and his actions are fatally out of step with his motivation. Substituting the siblings’ romantic/sexual relationship for a situation in which both siblings are victims of an abusive father who then murders the sister, apart from being needlessly complicated, immediately makes Woo-jin a different kind of character, and one whose drawn out, complex revenge scheme has no real sense of justice to it at all.
In Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy we – and Oh Dae-su – see on the news that Oh’s wife has been murdered. In the Hollywood version she has been raped and then murdered, a telling detail that makes her death a sadistic rather than purely pragmatic act – in the original she is simply collateral damage in Woo-jin’s mission to capture Oh’s daughter. That detail does nothing for the plot except to add to the atmosphere of brutality just in case a hammer fight wasn’t enough – while also making the movie’s villain into a far more generic bad guy. Likewise, if Oh Dae-su nobly atoned for the crime of unwittingly committing incest by severing all ties with his daughter, giving her money and voluntarily returning to the regimented safety of prison, as Joe Doucett does in the 2013 movie, he may as well have killed himself, except that that wouldn’t, in Hollywood terms, seem so noble. Choi Min-sik’s Oh Dae-su has many traits, but nobility is very rarely one of them. Attempting, with genuine tenderness, to protect his daughter-lover while also essentially having his cake and eating it, in blissful ignorance, free from the burden of guilt, is clearly an outrageous denouement, but it’s one that is absolutely in keeping with Oh Dae-su’s impulsive and emotional character throughout the rest of the film. Trying to foist a dramatically and emotionally satisfying ending onto Oldboy was always going to be a thankless task; Park Chan-wook instead plays to the story’s and the characters’ strengths and gives the film the necessary sense of closure while also feeling equally right and wrong.
John Webster or Cyril Tourneur couldn’t have done it better, only they would have called it The Alumni’s Tragedy and then nobody would have expected a happy ending anyway. As if this rare level of emotional complexity wasn’t enough in what is, after all, an action movie based on a comic book, Park Chan-wook’s assured, stylish direction and aesthetic sensibility, along with the movie’s uniformly excellent acting and sound design, makes Oldboy feel every bit as invigoratingly different now as it did two decades ago.
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