I have to admit feeling a little ambivalent toward Oldboy. I do think it's strong -- it grabs you in all the right places and puts you smack in the middle of all its luridness with its dark and dirty locations, messy violence, unglamorous sex and sordid desperation. It's an effective display of confident, visceral filmmaking. However, my problem with this movie is that it starts and ends with its own self-fascination, and that self doesn't stretch far beyond its gimmick premise.  

I've developed a knee-jerk reaction to gimmick premises, especially ones with a description that begins, "A man wakes up to find himself in..." They may have been fascinating to me once, but I instinctively dislike them now. Maybe they're too easy to think up, or maybe they're too easy to screw up once they're thought up. Remember Cube? Great idea, terrible ending. I stayed away from Saw last year because I became annoyed with it the minute I read what it was about. These are stunts -- not stories, and we want to watch them in the same way we want to watch people become uncomfortable when they're forced to live with each other on reality TV shows. Because these premises create such instant and contrived suspense/drama, you could call them microwaveable.

So Oldboy goes like this: a man wakes up to find himself imprisoned in a hotel room, and he's there for 15 years before he's let out and allowed to try to figure out why. For me, not a good start. But to the movie's credit, it goes about it in a fun, albeit squirmy and uncomfortable, way. This is because the film likes itself. It likes its mysterious plot, it likes the black humor it operates in, and it likes being goofy, shocking and sick. It especially likes its star, Choi Min-sik, and so do I -- he's more magnetic the closer he edges toward lunacy. The movie is constructed out of moments of pure irreverence for convention and psychological security. It just wants to get to us, and it wants us to laugh about it -- laugh at its pure audacity. A sudden suicide. An interesting choice for a meal. An unusual subway patron. A household tool used in a new, effective way to inflict pain. The idea that a guy can fight his way out of a gang after having no actual practice. And that the fight can last in one take so long and drawn out that you have to smile at it. Or laugh.

I appreciate this approach. After all, if you're going to start off with a gimmick, you might as well not take yourself too  seriously. But Oldboy has even more in store; in particular, it has perhaps one of the most twisted takes on revenge I've ever seen, but it's so twisted it's no longer believeable. All we can do is gawk at how far the movie seems willing to take its story. And far it goes indeed. It's one of those stories that can never, never, ever happen in real life -- it can only happen in the movies. So it's a good thing Oldboy never forgets it's a movie.

And perhaps it needs to be nothing more. Does this film have anything to say about the nature of revenge? Maybe. Maybe it's saying revenge is ultimately hollow -- that it causes pain for everyone involved, and that no good comes out of it in the end. But none of the characters seem to learn this nor do they care while heading in a straight line to their fates, intent on bringing this nasty little story to its inevitable conclusion. So it's really less about the nature of revenge and more about just trying to grab the audience with that conclusion. Anyhow, the revenge narrative is just a means; the movie's establishment of its own nihilistic sense of cool is its end. Oldboy just wants to have fun and, despite how I feel about movies like this, I can appreciate that.

(Released by Tartan USA and rated "R" for strong violence including scenes of torture, sexuality and pervasive language.)

Review also posted on www.windowtothemovies.com.