Oldboy
You keep scratching at Oldboy, looking for something beneath its blood and grime, but your fingernails just darken with the effort. Spike Lee, remaking the stomach-turning 2003 South Korean revenge fantasia, might have refracted the pulpy source material through his moral lens. Instead, he turns Josh Brolin loose with a hammer, calls in a Samuel L. Jackson favor and picks up a paycheck.
Most of what makes Lee a frustrating director is on display in Oldboy. Some of what makes Lee a fascinating director is also onscreen, in frustratingly scant quantity. Some directors visibly enjoy the chance to set aside dream projects long enough to complete work-for-hire palate cleansers. Among films by Lee’s peers, Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator and The Departed and Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can come to mind. But even allied with talented cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (whose 2013 also includes 12 Years a Slave, The Place Beyond the Pines and the most recent films by Michael Winterbottom and Neil Jordan), the director musters almost no excitement. His only signatory gesture is one shot done in his predictable man-on-a-Segway style, and dispensed with so quickly that it suggests embarrassment.
There’s nothing truly shameful on display, barring a laziness that’s beneath Lee but is still probably more work than the genre demands. The story (adapted by I Am Legend screenwriter Mark Protosevich) remains simple: Joe Doucette (an uneven Brolin, first hammy and then too aware of the material) is a mean drunk and a shitty husband and father, and one of his enemies performs an ahead-of-its-time act of extraordinary rendition on him. Locked in a private boutique prison for 20 years and framed for murder, he hones his innate nastiness into a biblical lust for vengeance. Then he is released and commences to stomping and stabbing his way to the center of the conspiracy against him.
He gets help from a smartly deployed Michael Imperioli and a distractingly pliant Elizabeth Olsen. He gets hurt by Sharlto Copley, beamed in from some other, more appropriately operatic melodrama. Who survives and how are beside the point, yet Lee directs his Oldboy as though those things matter. It’s not 20 years in a cell, but it’s two hours in poor company without the much-needed advocacy of an engaged talent.
