Oldboy (2003)
Directed by Park Chan-wook
With no clue how he came to be imprisoned, drugged and tortured for 15 years, a desperate man seeks revenge on his captors.
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9 films that influenced Oldboy
What critics say influenced Oldboy
John Boorman once told Lee Marvin to think of his revenge-blinded character in Point Blank as having died in the first minute and the rest of the film a red-hazed dream of his ill-spent life having mattered.
"Oldboy" contains a tooth-pulling scene that makes Laurence Olivier's Nazi dentist in " Marathon Man " look like a healer.
It should be noted that Oldboy contains scenes of intense violence, including one dental workout that puts Marathon Man to shame.
Parks latest, Oldboy, a thrilling black comedy-drama, will likely one day be upheld as an entry point into this decades Korean cinema as John Woos The Killer is for Hong Kongs cinematic resurgence in the American popular eye.
Intensely literate where Oldboy is intensely primal, it features mad monk Daniel Day-Lewis in his finest hour, crafting in ex-engineer, ex-hippie Jack the bookend to Jack Nicholson's George Hanson of Easy Rider: bound for tragedy on the horns of an impossible ideal.
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Tongues are mishandled, a reel-to-reel recorder is abused in a way unseen since The Conversation, and by the end of it, Oldboy has established South Korean cinema as one of the most consistently sensual cinemas in the world.
…because this has the look and feel of films like "Kill Bill" and "Pulp Fiction" but it's a lot more twisted.
Original music by Yeong-wook Jo ("Joint Security Area," "Tell Me Something") - Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" is also used - injects a European flavor into the mood.
In some ways, Oldboy is Korea’s answer to Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs, an undercover cop movie with undercover gangsters.
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Like banzai-violence kin to “Cast Away,” 2003’s “Oldboy” concerns a man who finds himself at time’s cruel whim.