Synopsis
A man has only three and a half days and limited resources to discover why he was imprisoned in a nondescript room for 20 years without any explanation.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Josh BrolinJoe Doucett
- Elizabeth OlsenMarie Sebastian
- Sharlto CopleyAdrian Pryce
- Samuel L. JacksonChaney
- Michael ImperioliChucky
- Pom KlementieffHaeng-Bok
- James RansoneDr. Tom Melby
- Max CasellaJames Prestley
- Linda EmondEdwina Burke
- Elvis NolascoCortez
Recommendations
- 83
IndieWire
It's been so long since Lee made such a thoroughly amusing work that fans should have no problem excusing its messiness. But make no mistake... Oldboy is all over the place, sometimes playing like a subdued melodrama and elsewhere erupting into flamboyance and gore. - 70
Arizona Republic
Surprisingly, the movie doesn’t bear much of the stylistic stamp we’ve come to expect of Lee, who’s in his generic journeyman mode here. But aside from a satisfyingly clever new direction in the denouement, what distinguishes the remake from the original is its cartoonishness. - 60
The Hollywood Reporter
While Lee leaves some of Park's more memorable outrages behind, he and screenwriter Mark Protosevich find one or two ways to up the taboo-testing ante, small surprises that retain the tale's edge without pushing into the realm of exploitation. - 60
New York Daily News
Leave it to Spike Lee to deliver one of the strangest, most off-putting movies for the Thanksgiving holiday. - 58
Tampa Bay Times
Spike Lee's remake of 2003's Oldboy is as brutally perplexing as the South Korean original, and needless for both its repetition and tweaks. Nothing is really lost in translation, or gained. - 42
The Playlist
While Lee edges in enough unique elements to argue a second look at the brutal revenge tale, his lean, blackly comic result is transcendent only in fits and starts, stripping away much of its thematic and emotional heft into one of the most frustratingly accomplished disappointments this year. - 39
Film.com
A slumming Spike Lee is still better than most directors at the top of their game, but Oldboy isn’t just Lee’s worst movie, it’s practically his “Wicker Man”. - 38
Slant Magazine
Spike Lee's version loses the one thing that really worked in the original, the sense of moral complication emerging out of the intertwined action of two men hell-bent on retribution.
