Offbeat, mysterious and violent, OLDBOY will keep you spellbound as it unravels its tangled web.
Josh Brolin is excellent as Joe Doucett, an account executive for a major advertising firm. In the opening scenes, Joe is revealed as a man without any moral or social rudder, going after his next big win in a drunken, rude and sloppy blur of forward, foul momentum.
After a particularly nasty series of events, he wakes up in a one room, hotel-like cell. For the next twenty years, Joe lives every moment fed only the news his captors want him to see.
Early on, he sees a news account that his ex wife has been murdered and that he is the #1 suspect.
Twenty years later, he wakes up in the middle of a field with a very clear objective of finding out who his captor was and why he was held for twenty years.
Joe is also driving to see his daughter and prove himself innocent of the killing.
Brolin is powerful as a man who will stop at nothing to find answers, albeit with a much more defined moral code than the one he owned when he was kidnapped.
Sharlto Copley is nearly unrecognizable (yet again) as The Stranger and Samuel L. Jackson is great as a very violent henchman. Michael Imperioli has his best role since "The Sopranos" as Joe's only life long friend that helps his unravel the mystery.
The violence is bloody, graphic and relentless and some of the fight scenes in which Brolin goes up against many very bad dudes at once are very well executed. The entire movie is visually arresting.
It's certainly a departure for Director Spike Lee, who brings a lot of style and momentum to the thriller.
It appears that rabid fans of the original "Oldboy", a huge hit in the Korean cinema, detest Lee's remake for American audiences. I will have to dig into that one for a comparison later, but as a stand alone film that kept me guessing, interested and entertained from beginning to end, I'll hammer OLDBOY out a solid B.
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