The feel-bad movie of the holiday season, Spike Lee’s often-repellent Americanized reimagining of Korean director Chan-Wook Park’s twisty 2004 revenge thriller “Oldboy’’ is relentlessly gruesome, self-consciously shocking and pretty much pointless.
Among other problems, this is the sort of movie in which all of the principal actors seem to be acting in different movies — except for the very game Josh Brolin, who is required, at various points, to act in pretty much all of them.
I was impressed with Park’s film when I saw its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, but Lee and Mark Protosevich’s rethink feels like assembly instructions for an especially intricate device badly translated into English. Yanked out of its original cultural context, what seemed daring and visionary now too often seems merely like a contrived and unpleasant wallow in sub-Tarantino-esque miseries.
Brolin certainly throws himself into the role of Joe, an alcoholic ad man and neglectful father in a generic American city (the film was perversely shot in unrecognizable sections of New Orleans) in the early 1990s.
One day, he wakes up a prisoner in a locked hotel room — where he’s held in solitary confinement for two decades by unseen jailors who provide food and booze three times a day — and use a gas to put him to sleep when they need to clean the room or take care of other chores.
Joe’s only contact with the outside world is a TV set, by which he learns, early in his stay, that he’s been framed for the murders of his wife and daughter.
Our hero eventually gives up the booze, starts working out, and slowly and painstakingly begins plotting an escape attempt. But he’s abruptly released into the modern outside world (where he adopts surprisingly quickly to things like cellphones).
Then a mysterious man (Sharlto Copley) offers Joe a deal that requires him to figure out why he was imprisoned in the first place — and why he’s been set free.
The answers to these questions seemed a lot more intriguing the first time around — now, in Lee’s hands, they’re more like a checklist of mechanical contrivances. Nor does the director do a particularly good job handling the martial-arts sequences that were so impressive back in 2004.
Some of the grisliest moments — and be warned, they push the limits of the R rating — involve Samuel L. Jackson in a relatively small role, sporting a blonde ponytail as Joe’s chief jailer-turned-tormentor.
Elizabeth Olsen plays a young paramedic who befriends and shelters Joe — and one of the plot’s more fiendish twists requires that the two of them hook up. To say the chemistry isn’t there is one of the year’s biggest understatements.
With Lee at the helm, “Oldboy’’ exasperatingly toggles between fantasy and a kind of stylized naturalism. It’s a fatal approach for a baroque melodrama that cries out for a director favoring operatic excess and bad taste — someone like Brian De Palma.