This Is One Of Five Warnings I Will Give You: I Am Totally About To Ruin Oldboy
I'm not kidding. Continuing on to the graphic will ruin the film if you haven't seen it, and it's actually good, so go see it first.
4chan loves Oldboy. Unfortunately, 4chan loves all sorts of horrible things that test the limits of human endurance, and its opinions therefore don't necessary translate into a sound endorsement. So let's start over.
There's a single-shot hallway fight scene in Oldboy that took seventeen takes to film. By Hollywood standards it's imperfect; a discerning viewer will detect a few pre-punch flinches, and the hero doesn't exclaim even one witty rejoinder.
But if you actually like, you know, shit that's good, you're going to like this scene. It's great in the way that live music is great compared to a flawless recorded rendition of the same music. It's a dozen guys operating on skill and choreography instead of a star who trained for a week eking out a fight scene through excessive editing and flying around on ropes.
Obviously Oldboy isn't just this one scene and then some closing credits (although perhaps if Tristan Tzara had made it, it would be). It's a noir romance, a revenge thriller; it's a stylistic endeavor with a really memorable conclusion (which I utterly ruin in the below graphic, so don't look at it if you haven't seen the film).
The real tragedy is that this film has grossed a paltry $15 million globally, which is, for example, roughly equivalent to what Bio-Dome grossed domestically. In case you're unaware, plenty of people who haven't seen Alone in the Dark consider Bio-Dome to be the worst film ever made.
If more audiences were willing to read a little bit, or if more studio executives thought that they were, anyway, perhaps films like this would get a well-deserved wide release. But someone's convinced that Joe America won't see anything with foreigners in it, so we remake J-horror with blondes instead of Asians, and horribleness instead of originality.
My meandering sufficiently exhausted, I can now say a few words about the film itself.
Uh... it's good. It's a good film. You should see it, probably.
Good times.
