Why remake oldboy

He looks into the yearbook and the name says "Adrian Pryce". Then when the shot zooms in, it says "Adrian Doyle Pryce". When Joe and Marie return back to the motel, Marie takes a picture of the yearbook photo where it now returns back to just "Adrian Pryce".

Quotes Chaney : Shit, you might wanna think about what you're doing here! User reviews Review. Top review. A remake that's just about adequate on its own merits, but is hardly a patch on the film on which it was based.

Hollywood remakes of Asian films are always an iffy proposition. How will the nuances and culturally-specific references translate across oceans and continents? Generally, however good the remakes, they rarely — if ever — eclipse the original films. In recent memory, perhaps only Martin Scorsese's The Departed, based on Infernal Affairs, has managed to find a life of its own. Spike Lee's Oldboy isn't completely terrible, but it does lose quite a bit of the dark, bruising, ambivalent flavour of Park Chan-Wook's Korean classic.

Josh Brolin takes centre stage in Lee's version. He sinks credibly into the abrasive, drunken skin of Joe Doucett, a slimy guy whose wife and daughter Mia have left him. Nevertheless, Joe continues to merrily offend everyone around him, until he is abruptly kidnapped and trapped in a hotel room for twenty years. During his arduous time spent in solitary confinement, Joe ponders the mystery of his captor. When he finally gets free, he resolves to seek revenge and re-connect with Mia — a mission that becomes increasingly fraught with complications as horrifying secrets from his past are unearthed.

On its own merits, Oldboy — the title as obtuse as ever — is passably gripping. It entertains and horrifies in equal measure, packing in a great deal of bone-crunching violence and torture that runs the gamut from physical to psychological and everything in between. The relationship that develops between Joe and charity worker Marie Elizabeth Olsen is well-acted, if a little forced.

Lee even cooks up a pretty disturbing face-off between Joe and Chaney Samuel L. Jackson , the guy in charge of locking up people for his clients — no questions asked. What works rather less well is the deliberate dilution of the twist in Oldboy's tale, presumably because American audiences can only handle so much moral and emotional ambiguity. Where Park's version sees the revenge mission warped with a horrifyingly emotional dilemma, Lee's film shies away from the conundrum.

As a result, the film becomes far less subtle and considerably more melodramatic. There's a flashback sequence towards the end of the film that's ridiculous enough to make audiences laugh rather than gasp, even as blood splatters across walls and families are torn apart.

The cast assembled is impressive, even though they're not really given a lot to work with in the frequently stilted, over-blown script. Brolin anchors the film with admirably stony determination, but his Joe never seems to really feel the weight of his twenty years without human contact. Olsen, too, stumbles around a bit, as if never quite sure how to play her part, and Sharlto Copley comes close to overplaying his hand when he emerges from the shadows to drop a few hints about the reasons behind Joe's ordeal.

There's enough on display in Oldboy for the film to jog by at a fairly quick clip. Lee pays tribute along the way to a few iconic elements of the Korean film — an octopus in a tank, a prolonged battle in a corridor — and the cast tries its hardest to make it all work. That leaves Lee's film as the lone true Oldboy remake, although it also contains a lot of notable differences.

Adrian Doyle Pryce only gives Joe 46 hours in Oldboy Upon getting released, he makes a phone call to his wife and daughter. He hands the phone to his best friend, No Joo-hwan, and is then kidnapped without a trace of his whereabouts. All he has is the TV to keep him company.

Oh Dae-su uses these notebooks as journals to keep a record of his time locked away from the outside world. Joe makes a bed for her made out of torn up toilet paper, and she has babies, which Joe is ecstatic about. However, he wakes up one day to find the mouse and her babies gone, and sobs over her disappearance. Later that day, his meal arrives on a silver platter, and the mouse and her dead babies are revealed to be inside cooked with garnish for Joe.

Oh Dae-su masturbates to women he sees on TV in Oldboy Joe also bites the webbing of his hand until it bleeds in order to draw a face in his blood on his pillowcase for comfort, in a way that's reminiscent of Wilson from Cast Away. The most noticeable difference between the two films while the main character is imprisoned is what they write on the paper provided to them in the hotel room.

Oh Dae-su writes a detailed journal of what he goes through over the course of several years in Oldboy Joe writes letters to his daughter Mia in Oldboy His letters are filled with his regrets and his desires while asking for forgiveness for never being there for Mia.

She compares it to ants being in groups and lonely individuals always thinking about that, since they only have themselves to keep them company. While in his hotel room, Oh Dae-su sees an ant crawling under his skin before a swarm of them are suddenly crawling all over his face. Mi-do relates it to a time when she was alone on the subway and saw a human-sized ant in the same car as her. While locked up, he discovers his ex-wife has been murdered, making his daughter an orphan.

Stricken with grief, Joe soon turns himself into a one-man revenge machine, working out every day until his sudden release, twenty years later a small change from the first movie, which has our hero in jail for only fifteen years. At this point, he decides to put his training to good use by hunting down the bastard who detained him. There is still a list of enemies, the use of poison gas, a greasy dumpling scavenger hunt, and the help of a young female acquaintance played by Elizabeth Olsen.

The backstory is longer and a little different. The new Oldboy starts with an overweight Brolin aimlessly wandering the city, flipping out at random strangers and harassing colleagues. In the original, we only get to see the lead, Oh Dae-su, briefly going nuts in one location before he gets snatched and shipped off to the Red Roof Inn Prison. Others will be shown in the form of clever Easter eggs, like a giant octopus in a fish tank or a street vendor wearing angel wings. The latter moments will either act as a nice callback to hardcore fans, or infuriate those expecting a better tribute — particularly when it comes to the octopus.