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Mar 21, 2011

Oldboy slices your head with its cold psychological edge. It starts of like a home video footage, at least the lighting made me think so. A bumbling comical drunkard in a police station, everyday event, right? It is pretty sane Saturday-'nighitsh' start for a psychological thriller. Then it puts you in prison with the main character for 15 years!

You don't know why this sh#t happened. More importantly the main character, Dae-Su is totally in the dark about it as well. He used to be a happy go lucky guy with a wife, a little daughter, a job and a few friends who you might find at a downtown bar on a Friday after work. Who would want to put him in prison for 15 years, feed him, clothe him, shave him - all this costs money. The film doesn't let the protagonist languish in prison for long, it quickly pans over the decade and a half in half hour and the rest is tightly gripping drama that you wouldn't see coming.

Very interesting story and an interesting movie. The fight scenes, the comedic aspect of those, reminds of Takeshi Kitano's movies. Definitely worth a watch.

2 comments:

deekay said...

yeah...i think Sanjay Dutt's Zinda was lifted from this one....;-)

A Movie Watchdog said...

Yeah, had seen Zinda a long while back. It looked good for an Indian movie and 'sounded' good too. I remember thinking then that it might have been copied from some Asian movie, but it didn't really click in my mind while watching OldBoy, until I saw your comment.

The premise on which OldBoy is built is hard to 'Indianize', although Sanjay Gupta copied everything else to the T.

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