Dir: Park Chan-wook
Cast: Min-sik Choi, Ji-tae Lu
Speaking of shocking, twisty, completely out of left field films, here's perhaps one that tops them all: "Oldboy." "Oldboy" is the kind of movie where you really don't know what to expect and once you find out what is really happening within the movie, you're pretty much forced to stop everything and try to figure it all out one-by-one.
The film centers around a man named Oh Dae-Su, a man who had been kidnapped and imprisoned for fifteen years until he finds himself released suddenly. Now he will spend the next few days trying to find the man who kidnapped and imprisoned him and then get his revenge. Yes, "Oldboy" is one hell of a revenge movie and its action scenes are very well done and originally made. You really haven't seen anything like it.
But more than that, this is a revenge film that will, pardon my language, fuck with your head. Now there are a couple of films like that on my top 10, some films that just completely rocked me in my seat with the amazing way that its plot unfolds, but "Oldboy" is perhaps the most insane of the bunch. Once you realize just why Oh Dae-Su was locked up and imprisoned... you don't know what to think at that point.
And the thing is, it doesn't really help when you watch it again. Sure, you can pick up on some things that you may have missed before, but to me, the movie just became more baffling (and more brilliant) every time I watched it.
Now "Oldboy" is the second movie out of Park Chan-wook's revenge trilogy. I haven't seen the other two films in the trilogy just yet, but if it's anything like "Oldboy" then I might want to brace myself. Nevertheless, "Oldboy" and its filmmaker proves just what kind of crazy and exciting stories that people are telling with films all over the world. "Oldboy" just might have been the best of what Asian cinema had to offer in the 2000s, it certainly was in my book.
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