Oldboy (Spike Lee, 2013)

 

There is clearly a difficult task here. Remaking Oldboy is something that can get you to making a big failure, a huge crap of a movie. Some films seem to work only in the original. And Oldboy has become such a cult phenomenon that is clearly a very dangerous job trying to remake it. Spike Lee is a polarizing a director. He has made some great movies and also has made movies that are close in being unwatchable. He is certainly driven by his obsessions with African American culture that sometimes shine and produce a powerful, deep and controversial movie like Do The Right Thing and other times produce pure crap, that makes you wonder, what the fuck went so wrong, like Da 5 Blood. But here he swims in new territories. He is making a neo-noir twisted thriller that has nothing to do with his obsessions and by the gods he is making a wonderful job. Oldboy is a movie that has certainly reason to exist. Oldboy is not simply a remake of the South-Korean movie made by Park Chan-wook, it's a movie that can stand of its own, it's a thriller that can proudly say that produces tons of pure and twisted suspense.

It's a movie that doesn't go with the usual American way of doing things, that when emotions get too tough, the movie steps away from there. No, Oldboy goes all the way, it goes where you can feel your heart bouncing inside your chest like a fucking missile ready to be fired. It's definitely a sign that Spike Lee is a totally capable director of making genre cinema. It's a sign that Spike Lee could make thrillers and horror movies that would be superb, simply superb. Oldboy is a movie that slaps you in the face a thousand times per second. It's a movie that goes deeper and deeper and deeper into the hell that has manufactured. And yes, maybe is very similar to the original, but it is another movie. It's a movie that in the same way that it is similar, it steps away from the original also. I believe that this is the most underrated film by Spike Lee, a movie that many critics have totally bombed and trashed unforgivably. It's so outrageous they give four stars to some of his movies that are totally horrible to watch and when he is trying something different and fresh, they fucking trash him, horribly. Yeah, well so much for the critics, they are totally useless. They are parasites, feasting on other people's work and artistic expression. How could they produce something worthy these people, they are a total failure to existence.