Hey, have you ever seen… Oldboy?

The Captor:

You want to torture me, but I can simply kill myself first. Do you want revenge, or do you want the truth?

I know, I know…Oldboy is sort of a big deal, and I sort of tried to set this series of articles up as focusing on the lesser-known side of moviedom, and yeah, this flick is one of the better known foreign films of late.  I get it.  It’s kinda mainstream to the aficionado, but bear with me here; if you’re sitting around the water cooler at work, how many of your co-workers do you think really know about this piece? Well, unless you work for Tartan Asian Extreme, who distributed the flick on DVD, in which case, HEY THANKS FOR READING!

This is for you, water cooler people.

Oldboy is batshit lunacy.  It hits the ground running by earning a, “…the hell is going on here?” and refuses to let up until the end.  It’s action, it’s noir, it’s revenge, it’s weird, it’s sorta fucked up, it’s really fucked up, and it’s great, great cinema.  Not so much in the Schindler’s List sense, but in the Fight Club sense.

Oh Dae-Su (played with manic intensity by Choi Min-Sik [no, I’d never heard of him either, I won’t claim to be Captain Foreign Cinema]) is your typical guy who lives a shit life, gets drunk to forget about his crap job, and on and on.  Then someone kidnaps him, sticks him in a room for a number of years (read: 15) and lets him stew.  Once our Oldboy has been properly marinated, his captor not only lets him free, but teases him with the prospect of revenge, telling him over a phone call what amounts to, “if you can figure out who I am and why I did this, I’m all yours.”

This is just the first third of the movie, by the way.

The film just goes on to have a ton of amazing moments as Oh Dae-Su looks for revenge for 15 lost years of life, things I won’t say here so as to not spoil the impact.  Just be on the lookout for a hammer, an amazing, side-scrolling longshot, an octopus, and some faint nausea.  Your nausea, by the way, not nausea portrayed in the movie…thought I should clear that up.

I really can’t talk a whole lot about this one without feeling like I would put a little blast shield in front of the shockwave that this flick creats.  Put it on your ‘flix, borrow it from your film-geek friend, or appropriate it from your local retailer.  It’s good times, you have my word.  And my axe!