Oldboy

The worst-case scenario for a de-weirded, point-missing, dumbed-down remake of Chan-wook Park's modern revenge-movie masterpiece comes to fruition with Spike Lee's absolutely awful Oldboy. Josh Brolin stars as a womanizing drunk who, for reasons never explained to him, is kidnapped and imprisoned in a single room for 20 years. Even more mysterious is his sudden release, which starts him on a blood-soaked path toward discovering the truth. Brolin's mannequinlike performance doesn't even result in a mentally unhinged protagonist, which is a key character trait and essential to understanding Park's genre-influenced, hyperstylized universe (by comparison, Lee's Oldboy seems to take place in “the real world”). Instead, Brolin is just another hardened Hollywood vengeance-bot running off Jason Statham's operating system. All of the perverse lumps of the Korean original have been flattened down into a trite, pathologically unimaginative revenge thriller designed to displease everyone.