Flasz On Film

I think it’s fair to say that Spike Lee didn’t intend to direct the English-language remake of the Park Chan-wook-directed cult hit Oldboy. This wasn’t a grassroots project for him as it simply fell into his lap after a number of filmmakers, like Justin Lin and Steven Spielberg, exited this game of hot potato with material that even the most optimistic Hollywood insiders would likely call challenging. But it sure is an interesting specimen to have a closer look at.

The 2003 original, despite glowing praise coming out of the Cannes Film Festival where it won the Grand Prix and generated cultural momentum driven by Quentin Tarantino’s sway, was a bit of an acquired taste. Between its visually arresting imagery, “live-action anime” editing that later became the director’s signature, a handful of standout sequences and the notoriously grim twist ending, Oldboy was already a unique and singular entity. Therefore, it made very little sense to transport it into the American setting and retell the same story, other than because the clout of the original and the removal of the movie’s language and cultural barrier would likely increase the chances of producing a good return at the box office. Nevertheless, at least at the time when this idea was being tossed around at various working lunches and cocktail parties attended by studio moguls, the J-craze was still in full swing with the remakes of The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water and others producing satisfactory receipts.

So, you could argue that remaking Oldboy in the 2000’s both made a lot of sense and then it equally didn’t tally up because it was not a simple J-horror with niche appeal but a bona fide singularity with a well-crystallized cult following.

Long story short, after Lin and Spielberg had a go at developing this project and after the original manga publishers upon which the Korean movie was based engaged in litigation regarding the transfer of rights to Hollywood, a number of years passed. By the time Spike Lee was tapped to direct it, the iron was no longer hot enough to strike. Even still, the production was a nightmare and Spike Lee, who produced a nearly 140-minute-long cut, was locked out of the editing room. We might never know what his original vision for the remake of Oldboy could have been. The movie we got is the one the producers trimmed to 100 minutes and released to the public where it was rinsed critically and almost completely overlooked by audiences. It stands as one of the biggest disappointments of its year and an easy target to pick apart by fans of the original movie.

In fact, you probably don’t need to avail yourself of the original to pull this movie asunder as Sharlto Copley’s performance alone as the film’s main villain—indulgent and uneven at best and occasionally completely out of step with the entire cast—is enough to turn people away. It was a mess and to this day the 2013 Oldboy remains the only movie in Spike Lee’s filmmaking catalogue that was refused the moniker of a Spike Lee “joint.”

But even though the filmmaker himself effectively disowned this project—and he had his reasons due to being sidelined by producers in post-production—this movie deserves a precious few moments of attention, first and foremost because it might be in a position to illuminate a thing or two about Spike Lee’s interests. After all, there must have been a reason why Lee ended up in the driver’s seat. Apart from the obvious monetary incentive, this story (which Lee also didn’t write) must have offered something of value to this stylistically bold auteur with well-recognized proclivities towards addressing long-standing sociopolitical issues in his work.

It is an interesting exercise to set both the original and the remake side by side and see which elements of Park Chan-wook’s movie could have spoken to the filmmaker, how this reimagining changed things around and which elements it ended up embellishing and emphasizing. The 2003 movie was a thematically complex tale of morality and corruption of the soul that was otherwise quite general. At its core, it was a tale of an absentee father who chose to spend his daughter’s birthday drinking himself into a stupor and then ended up snatched from the street and imprisoned for fifteen years in solitary confinement by a mysterious villain. The movie then transformed into an archetypal revenge narrative in which Oh Dae-su ploughed through enemies as he attempted to find out the identity of his captor, which led to the well-described notorious ending that brought both him and the audiences to their knees in a resolution comparatively hard-hitting as the likes of Seven, The Mist or Requiem for a Dream.

This central concept of following a deadbeat dad who had disappeared from the picture in the past, as he attempts to find his daughter only to corrupt both her and his own life in the end must have been of fundamental interest to Spike Lee who had spent his entire career commenting on the crisis of fatherlessness in movies like Clockers, Do the Right Thing, Summer of Sam, Crooklyn and many others and a story like Oldboy presented an opportunity to do so both directly and in an elevated fashion as well. There’s a certain degree of deliberate sense of direction tugging and pulling at Josh Brolin’s performance as the protagonist, as he progresses from terminal neglect of his identity as a father to a born-again resolve, and how he becomes so blinded by his single-minded focus on relentless retribution against the people who took away his life and family that he finds himself entrapped by his captor and his own carnal desires.

What is also intriguing about the 2013 remake is how it imbues the narrative with a sense of scale and societal commentary the 2003 original did not have spare capacity to tackle. The film Lee directed (from Mark Protosevich’s script) includes—for those who choose to look between the lines and read into the story just a tiny bit more than the average bear—a heightened conversation about class. In Park’s movie, the pedigree of Oh Dae-su’s captor was merely a footnote, as was the existence of a secret prison where people with sufficient funds could place whoever they wished against their will. In the 2013 remake, these concepts are core to the thematic conversation woven around the movie’s revenge narrative.

Sharlto Copley’s character is more than a guy with money, but an exemplar of the wealthy ruling class. He is so obscenely rich that he can afford to have cameras in any house he wants (a point of contention as far as plain old logic is concerned, for sure), bug anyone’s phone and meticulously weave a revenge plan over the period of many years without having to worry about putting food on the table. Moreover, this is also where one of the biggest changes in the script is made as Copley’s reason for Brolin’s imprisonment extends far beyond the simple taboo the original dealt with. In Lee’s vision, Copley is a product of an inter-generationally incestuous family of people who are all so terminally corrupt and morally warped that it simply beggars belief, and perhaps raises an eyebrow or prods the critically inclined to pick this decision, or even the entire movie, apart.

The private prison run by Samuel L. Jackson’s character also receives a few subtle comments to rationalize its existence in the world, as it is implied that it’s there to serve the whims of the super-rich in general. It’s been there long before Jackson’s character took over its stewardship and it shall remain after he’s gone. It’s there because people with money to burn might want to spend it there. Supply and demand.

Taken together, the 2013 Oldboy places emphasis in intriguing places and strategically introduces thematic grace notes that allow this story to become a heightened and hyper-stylized conversation that extends Spike Lee’s longstanding interests. He had previously dealt with class tensions in Do the Right Thing and Inside Man among others and this movie adds a new dimension to this conversation. In fact, it is best to see it as Spike Lee’s superhero movie or even a protoplast to John Wick. This way, Brolin’s journey of revenge assumes the gravitas of a story about a mortal standing up to omniscient and omnipotent gods but retains the boldness of a comic book movie. Between Sam Jackson’s costume and hair, Sharlto Copley’s Lex-Luthor-from-Wish vibes, Brolin’s post-Neo, Wick-esque costume and a procession of mini-bosses punctuating the narrative, It’s hard to overlook the possibility that the Oldboy remake was supposed to function on the plane of the bombastic rather than attempting to wrestle with its narrative straight up.

Therefore, if you have what it takes to stomach Sharlto Copley’s shoddy dialect work and look away when he ruins the finale of the movie with his narration delivered in Christ pose, the Spike Lee-directed Oldboy might rise in your estimation. It is an intriguing window into the filmmaker’s interests that supplies unequivocal pointers towards his obsessions. After all, we always have the original to compare the movie to and we can see clearly how the centre of gravity has been shifted, where new flourishes have been placed and how the end result sparks different conversations than the original did.

In fact, Lee’s further work on Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (a stealth reimagining of Ganja & Hess) and his recent remix of High and Low serve to cement this analysis, as they all use other movies as templates to morph and shape so that they’d speak volumes about class divides, punching up across social strata, and the crisis of fatherlessness gripping western societies. So, even though Oldboy didn’t get to be called a Spike Lee joint, it’s very much a required viewing for those wishing to understand more about this unique filmmaker. It’s a movie that could have been set in the John Wick universe, where Charon’s hotel is just down the road from Sam Jackson’s secret prison, where the billionaire class is portrayed as intrinsically evil, corrupt and frighteningly all-powerful in the way comic book villains are, and where a hyper-stylized and visually indulgent saga of tragic revenge can be enacted using the kind of sweeping panache Spike Lee had consistently deployed in his work. Hence, the 2013 Oldboy might not be a good movie per se—with its many requirements for the viewer to turn a blind eye to logic flaws and hold fast while Sharlto Copley does his thing working hard to undermine its stature—but it’s definitely worth watching. That is, if you know what to look for, which I think you should do, having read this wall of text.