Oldboy

Like our very own Sanjay Gupta's desi remake Zinda, this one too is all style over any real substance.

Everything about the film is half-assed, from the writing to the direction to the acting by Josh Brolin. The whole thing really feels like an Asylum remake of Oldboy with an aftertaste of the live octopus that Oh Dae Su swallows in the original.

I'm not sure why Spike Lee's Oldboy exists. The original film, made by South Korean director Park Chan-wook in 2003, is a cult classic that won the Grand Prix in Cannes. ...recommending that you enjoy the original Oldboy. The new one is too dated.

The film has graphic violence and perversion, but there is no take-away. It leaves you trying to nail down what the point to this remake really was.

Oldboy doesn't bear much of Lee's characteristics, though it can be entertaining, in a remake study kind of way, to see how he contorts an already much-contorted story into his own film. Much of the dialogue is stilted (several scenes are laughable) and the melodrama feels unmoored without the lurid, baroque atmosphere of Park's film — which, after all, was kind of the whole point. Lee feels lost here, too aware that Oldboy isn't really his movie.

Watching Oldboy feels like you're watching a history lesson on the projector in your seventh grade class. While the visuals may be dark and slick, there is really nothing about the film that feels even a tiny bit humane. Cyborgs might as well have crafted this. Oldboy is not for the weak-hearted. Or film lovers. Or just people, in general.