A high speed science fiction thriller with a difference, and three of my favourite actors!
Lucy is just another girl before a friend gets her involved with a Korean drug cartel, she is abducted and becomes infected with an experimental neural stimulating drug. The effect cascades and increases, making Lucy a superhuman with access to incredible mental powers. Can questions about the human mind be answered before the cartel catch up with her? Or will she self-destruct under the increasing strain on her body?
I was more than happy that two of my favourite actors were in this film, headliners Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman, but imagine my joy and surprise to see Oldboy's Min-sik Choi in the opening credits too!
French director Luc Besson is no stranger to superhuman heroines either, colours of Leeloo from The Fifth Element and shades of one of his first films La Femme Nikita. He is in his element here. It is also great to see something original again! Something akin to comics and current science fiction franchises and yet an original screenplay!
The film is fast paced and full of action set pieces and physical fighting as we watch Lucy develop from the standard "10%" of her brain capacity escalates higher and higher! We know Johansson is capable in stunts and action what with Marvel's Black Widow character, but Lucy becomes more of a race against the clock than a brawler, introducing the audience to the incredible mental powers humans might be capable of. It uses its entire runtime to express what is happening to Lucy and how it affects her mentally.
Min-sik Choi's antagonist isn't used as much as I would have liked, but as a Korean powerhouse of acting talent, it is good to see him in a Western production, especially one such as this!
The film's key strength lies in its sense of humour, which goes from dry and intelligent to subtle and goofy. While Johansson's Lucy becomes colder and more detached from her human side, our secondary characters, especially Freeman, have great fun bouncing off her detachment and incredible powers with bewilderment. This humour and fast pace stops the film becoming something of a pretentious waste of time and more an enjoyable romp with intelligent undertones.
This sense of humour does go off the deep end a little. Besson, in a peculiar move, splices throughout his film footage of wildlife and disconnected scenes that are metaphors for what is happening narratively. For example, when Lucy is first kidnapped we see an escalating scene of a cheetah stalking its prey, or a mouse going towards a trap. Running parallel with this is Freeman's initial presentation speech about the human mind, also with wildlife footage.
This will probably alienate the wider audience, who'll wonder why there's National Geographic clips in their action movie!
But after reminding myself this is a Luc Besson film, Lucy gets better and better as it goes on and you can't wait to see how far her mental powers go, and how the director will present it!
Remake Rumble...? More like Remake Execution.
So, against my better judgment I've decided to do this particular Remake Rumble! I guess it wouldn't leave my mind until I had seen it through. Read, and feel the frustration!
Oldboy (2003)
The definition of a revenge tale, beautifully savage and cynically dark in humour, Oldboy is one of those films that gets better and better each time you watch.
A drunken, hopeless father is abducted on his daughter's birthday and imprisoned in a room for fifteen years. When he is mysteriously released, he swears vengeance on whoever took his life away.
It is hardest to write a review of a film you like so much. If you look at Cinema Cocoa's first post, you will find Oldboy makes the twentieth spot on my top fifty films, yet I don't remember how I came by this film originally. All I do remember is the impact it left on me as a piece of film making!
Directed by Chan-wook Park, Oldboy crams almost every facet of revenge into its two hour runtime and packages it with great cinematography and a wonderful score. With Min-sik Choi as the leading man providing a great range of acting talent, there's a fantastic sense of dedication and integrity to the film.
But praise doesn't stop there. The film is remarkably well paced for how many scenarios it plays out and how complex the screenplay becomes. Like peeling an onion, every scene and every set piece has a purpose to unlocking the mystery behind our hero's plight, the writing just dropping enough hints that... if you are clever enough and reading between the lines... audiences can start to puzzle it all together.
I've seen this film at least three times now and it is safe to say I appreciate more and more each time!
Why only three times? I've had the DVD in my collection for years! Well, Oldboy is not the easiest film to watch, it certainly might turn some people's stomachs and there is one scene involving a claw hammer that makes me squirm every time and just thinking about it makes my teeth hurt...
But while the film is intensely violent (the corridor fight scene has gone down in cinema history by now!) I forget the wicked, black sense of humour that runs all the way through also. This film has an awesome script and Min-sik Choi delivers his lines and reacts to his internal monologues with incredibly sick jest. I laugh with him, and as the film says: "Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone."
How much longer can I gush about a film? Not much longer as I don't want to spoil it by telling you too much. The film has a surrealist edge, though like the violence it is somewhat restrained in preference of a calm, methodical dive into madness. At times Oldboy just seems like a casual stroll with morose, almost reluctant tones, and I think that's why I enjoy it so much; while the violence is visceral at its heights, it isn't a slasher movie... it is a thriller.
With a screenplay so layered and mysterious, with acting both subtle and outrageous, intense action and a script both comic and horrible, Oldboy offers everything and fails at none of them. By the end your mind will be bruised and sore from the ordeal, yet amazed at the masterful execution of it all!
Oldboy (2013)
Spike Lee directs a watery, shallow remake of the cult Korean film. Josh Brolin weeps, and Josh Brolin weeps alone.
A drunken father and failing husband finds himself imprisoned for twenty years in a mock-up hotel room. When he is released he aims to clear his name, reunite with his daughter and find whoever locked him away for so long.
Okay, so as you can tell already I love the original movie and a remake by its very existence will frustrate me. In fact I boycotted seeing this film originally, that's how low my expectations were! This Oldboy received such a critical hammering (no pun intended) that I was prepared to forget it even existed... but that would be ignorant of me...
Initially, I had some hope this film would be just "average" and not the train wreck I feared; Josh Brolin is probably the best American to fill the acting range and physical ability to fill Min-sik Choi's formidable shoes, and automatically I knew (mostly from having such an indepth understanding of the original) how this American version's twist ending would differ. It seemed vaguely promising.
But almost like a reversal of the original film, where it gets better and better, this film gets worse and worse... and worse.
None of the original's black humour is present, none of it, unless you count laughing at all the wrong parts to be edgy comedy. The editing is terrible, what was Spike Lee doing with this?? It has zero gravity or atmosphere, and feels more like running through a checklist of requirements such as the shoehorned nods to the original like... showing us an octopus! For no reason! The characters even act unnaturally in scenes just to have a shot framed like the original! Then... there's the hammer scene. Badly choreographed, badly structured... it pales in comparison.
Part of what made the original so interesting was how interwoven its screenplay became as you watched the puzzle unlock, but here, there's none of that, it just plods along like any other cliche hostage movie.
Oh, but we have Samuel L. Jackson, and he swears a lot! Is that... supposed to be the humour coming through? Having an actor playing the same role he plays in sodding everything he's ever done?
Then...
There's Sharlto Copley. The guy who used to be cool from District 9. Good... lord.
So, this film becomes something of a "who done it?" in the second act, Brolin's Joseph is trying to find who had imprisoned him. He gets a phone call from Copley's Adrian who is putting on the most generic, cringeworthy, stereotypical upper-class British accent you can fathom! Good god, Spike Lee, what... This is NOT acting, this is hamming it up! I swear, at the end of this film, he is walking around like Nosferatu!
And remember, we are in America. Are you telling me that when Joseph finds the antagonist went to the same school as him he didn't consider: "Hm, who at my school had a CARTOONISHLY BRITISH ACCENT LIKE THE ONE I JUST HEARD ON THE PHONE?"
Sorry, I will try to regain my composure.
Asides a cartoon villain, Nick Fury, bad film-making, and terrible homages to the original I tried to see this as a unique film. Many people say don't compare remakes to the original (despite how that is a completely ridiculous concept)
America's Oldboy could have been quite interesting had it distanced itself more from the original, what we get it something lost in translation, like an abridged version or worse: a parody. I think what damages it most is its finale, and its villain's motivations... or rather lack thereof.
Even the violence is toned down, I even saw a computer generated blood splatter. Seriously? Though the sexual content was higher than expected, given how America hates that sort of thing.
This film isn't just a direct insult to the original masterpiece, this is an insult to American movie making. If you are going to remake something, at least try and do a good job with it! Don't say something like: "Oh, well the Korean film was weird, so dumb Western audiences will take my shoddy, cliche script and bad directing as avant garde and self-aware that it is of Asian origin!"
Additional Marshmallows: Why one full, happy, marshmallow-filled cup of cocoa? You ask? Josh Brolin... and the sliver of original thought that was buried under the nonsense of abusing someone else's original idea.
Korean cinema once again blurs the line of good and evil while at the same time twisting your stomach and fraying your nerves. This film isn't Oldboy but it is certainly memorable.
When a police officer's fiancee is tortured and killed by a serial killer, he vows revenge by hunting the killer down and... instead of handing him over to authority or even killing him, the officer instead exacts his own torture and deprives the killer of further victims.
Directed by Kim Jee-woon (The Good, the Bad and the Weird; a cult favourite of mine) and starring Min-sik Choi and Byung-hun Lee in the lead roles, this film certainly delivered what I was expecting. Some great acting with disturbing characters and good film making.
Who are these people, you might ask, Min-sik Choi is most recognised as the lead from the original Oldboy (within my top 20 films) and you might recognise Byung-hun Lee as he features in recent western blockbusters such as the G.I Joe films.
I Saw the Devil is not for the faint of heart. Our serial killer, who we follow for most of the story, is rapist and murderer of young women, and we see a lot of what he does. Unlike a lot of western cinema this film doesn't pull its punches very often, but the effect is exactly as the narrative requires. The killer is merciless, but our "hero" becomes so unhinged with revenge that he becomes something of a monster himself.
While many can sympathise with revenge, especially on someone so hideously deprived as our killer, the calculated lengths in which our law abiding officer goes to make him suffer makes the audience start to question his integrity.
The film's best moments are surely when these two characters connect; the brief moments when the murderous hunter is hunted down himself. Byung-hun Lee is an excellent on-screen fighter and even shows some parkour skills here too, coupled with Min-sik Choi's terribly disturbing finesse at acting as a psychopath, you have a great chemistry between the two.
I was a little worried for repetition when the character looked to reenact the hammer scene from Oldboy, but it wasn't so. Instead we get a similarly great fight within a moving taxi cab!
But, this isn't as good as Oldboy (the theme of revenge makes the two supposedly comparable) certainly my expectations weren't too high and this easily exceeded them, but I Saw the Devil felt a little drawn out. I think twenty minutes could have been cut easily from it and still have the impact. This feeling is exaggerated with multiple moments of "is that the end?" It also suffers from some occasional cliches, though I can't say it was predictable.
It isn't for everyone, sex and increasingly agonising torture scenes are rife, but fans of the slasher genre definitely need apply! The film making is above average and doesn't fall into too many cheap shocks and the acting is excellent, making it one of the best in the genre.
