일본 만화를 원작으로 한 올드보이는 영문도 모른채 8평 공간에 15년 동안 갇혀 있던 오대수와 그를 가둔 이우진의 갈등과 복수를 그린 스릴러 영화이다. 이 영화는 마지막 결말이 충격적인 반전으로 관객들을 매우 놀라게 한 영화이다. 최민식, 유지태가 주연을 맡았고, 이번에 세계적인 시상식인 칸 영화제에서 감독상을 수상하였다. 그리고 헐리우드에서 올드보이를 리메이크 한다고 한다. 세계가 주목한 영화인 만큼 올드보이는 특별한 존재의 영화일거라고 생각된다.
Based on a Japanese comic book, "The Old Boy" is a dramatic, revenge-throttled thriller that tells the story of Oh Dae-soo who spends 15 years locked in a cell and his ravisher, Lee Woo-jin. A great twist lurks at the end of the film to traumatize the audience. Wih the starrings of Choi Min-sik and Yu Ji-Tae, the film has clinched the Best Director in 2004 Cannes Film Festival. "The Old Boy" is currently being remade in Hollywood. At the centre of international spotlight, the film might win more hearts of critics and viewers alike.
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The mind-bending Korean revenge fantasy Oldboy evokes so many classic moments of cinematic excess that you would almost think it was an exercise in one-upmanship. To wit: an elaborate and disturbing incest subplot that makes Chinatown's look linear, dentistry torture scene that Marathon Man look tame, a bloody tongue-slicing,and any number of evocations of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. There are a controversial live-octopus lunch scene, a bloody hammer-fight and...spoilerism. Director Chan-wook Park is one of a young school of Korean auteurs engaged in fairly explicit filmmaking, inspired by what they see as the underlying violence and sexual dysfunction of contemporary Korea. These kimchee Scorseses are clearly not bound by the current Puritanical standard of North American movie-making, and can be as "out there" in realizing their feverish nightmares s early David Lynch. Park's Oldboy is a hypercharged paranoid fantasy that begins with a night on the two by a Seoul business named Dae-su Oh (Min-sik Choi),who, among other transgressions, has forgotten his daughter's birthday. After being freed on a charge of public intoxication and misconduct, he is abducted and wakes up in what looks like a cheap hotel room, but it is to be his prison for fifteen years. Park loves Choi's deranged face, and treats the audience to frequent close-ups of his unshaven maniacal grin as he caresses the TV screen (so starved is his human contact),masturbates teaches himself to fight by pounding walls with his fist, and plots his escape and revenge. One day gas rolls in his room, a la TV's The Prisoner, and Dae-su wakes up on a rooftop to find a man about to commit suicide. This bizarre encounter kicks off a five-day marathon of sleuthing, discovery and revenge, marked by several bloody brawls, and sex with a kindly female sushi chef (Hye-jeong Kang),who may or may not be conspiring with Dae-su's captors. Park imbues this mad chase with sardonicism and deranged energy, true to the movie's comic book template (it's taken from a popular Japanese manga). There are weird close-ups, stop-action and odd gimmicks like a dotted line that suddenly appears between a hammer and the eventual point of entry into its victim. There labyrinthine trail to an enemy Dae-su never knew he had underscores deeper thoughts on the nature of revenge. Both Dae-su and the mysterious enemy have effectively lost their identities to revenge. It becomes clear hate is all that sustains them, and to reconcile it is to leave them empty. A discomfiting film,but a stunning ly-twisted artistic endeavor.
Plot: a drunken Korean businessman is kidnapped and kept for fifteen years in a "cell" that resembles a cheap hotel room with only TV for company and meals delivered through a slot. Finally, he is inexplicably set free and, fuelled by revenge, he sets out to unearth the reason for his captivity.