Oldboy (2005)
TOMATOMETER
AUDIENCE SCORE
Critic Consensus: Violent and definitely not for the squeamish, Park Chan-Wook's visceral Oldboy is a strange, powerful tale of revenge.
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Cast
as Oh Daesu
as Lee Woo-jin
as Mido
as Mido
as No Joo-hwan
as Park Cheol-woong
as Mr. Han
as Yoo Hyung-ja
as Lee Soo-ah
as Beggar
as Suicidal Man
as Young Dae-su
as Young Woo-jin
as Young Joo-hwan
as Delivery Boy
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Critic Reviews for Oldboy
All Critics (135) | Top Critics (37) | Fresh (108) | Rotten (27) | DVD (14)
Both brutal and lyrical, writer-director Park Chan-wook's existential nail-biter has torture scenes that will have you avoiding dentists, sushi bars and badly appointed hotel rooms.
Shakespearean in its violence, Oldboy also calls up nightmare images of spiritual and physical isolation that are worthy of Samuel Beckett or Dostoyevsky.
There's a lot less here than meets the eye.
Quite an achievement then, and well worthy of its Cannes prize.
It's hard to make an argument for Oldboy based on anything other than pure cinematics, but when the style speaks this loudly, it's an argument worth making.
It's mesmerizing and discomfiting, engaging the viewer on a visceral and an intellectual level.
Audience Reviews for Oldboy
Daesu Oh is a drunk and a philanderer but otherwise a fairly typical husband and father, until one day he is kidnapped and imprisoned in a cell for 15 years with only a TV set for company and no word of explanation. One day he wakes up on the outside with only a wallet and a phone, and he sets out on a single-minded quest to find out why he was imprisoned and extract bloody vengeance on those responsible. The second part of the Vengeance Trilogy by Chan-wook Park, Oldboy is a bizarre and brilliant film. It constantly wrong foots you and messes with your perceptions, and contains the kind of revelation that makes the kind of so-called plot "twists" of most films look gimmicky and inane. This is the kind of film that blows you away and makes you realise you've been watching the WHOLE THING from the wrong standpoint. As for Min-sik Choi's performance, astonishing is the only word for it...the way such intense emotions and motivations are constantly shifting without ever feeling contrived or forced is just spellbinding. It combines art and extreme violence in a way that reminded me of A Clockwork Orange, but better! It's also stylistically on the same level as Fight Club and is absolutely riveting from beginning to end. A virtually flawless modern masterpiece.
Super Reviewer
A disturbing, dark, but undeniably creatively constructed melodrama concerning a man (Choi Min-sik) who on the evening of his daughter's birthday, is captured and locked away for 15 years and not told why, before being suddenly, inexplicably released into the world, where he seeks vengeance against his captor. This is a hard movie to recommend because the subject material is so disgusting and unlikable, but from a pure artistic perspective and how everything is put together, this is a phenomenal film. It is really a modern-day Shakespearean tale acted to perfection, with twists in the story that are definitely sick and shocking. Proceed with caution, but in the end this is a really, really well done movie that is worthy of the cult following it has garnered over the years. The ending will leave you picking up what is left of your brain off the floor.
Super Reviewer
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Oldboy Quotes
| Mido: | In front of me is some kind of box.He`s telling me to open it.... |
| Mido: | In front of me is some kind of box. He`s telling me to open it. |
| Oh Dae-Su: | If they had told me it was going to be fifteen years, would it have been easier to endure. |
| Oh Dae-Su: | Be it a stone or a grain of sand, in water they both sink. |
| Mido: | I love dae-su |
| Mido: | I love dae-su. |