Well Spike Lee’s “Oldboy” is not necessarily an easy movie to review (hence the small delay in writing this), as the 2003 South Korean thriller of the same name and which Spike Lee and screenwriter Mark Protosevich remade (or “reinterpreted,” as Mr. Lee insists) has become one of the more popular non-American films to storm the U.S. in the last decade, and more personally, remains fairly high on my own list of awesome movies which everyone else should watch and appreciate. So how can I look at this new “Oldboy” as its own thing? It does not exist in a vacuum.

But is it really fair to compare the two movies? To be honest, I am pretty much unable to imagine this movie existing on its own, which means I can not imagine what other people would think when they see this movie for the first time without having seen the South Korean original. Would they be baffled by this movie? How would the ending hit them? Does the movie even make sense?

This last question is kind of important, as Spike Lee recently confirmed that this movie was taken out of his hands after he turned in a cut of the film that ran for two hours and twenty minutes and it was cut down to 105 minutes without any of his input or blessing (Lee also shot down the rumor that the film at one point had a three-hour runtime). No movie can survive a 35 minute trim to the story without suffering, and I really want to know what was cut, although I do have my suspicions based on what was actually screened for audiences. Will people understand the motivations behind the different characters? Will they be confused when people are angry at each other in one scene and then they are helping each other in the next scene without any rhyme or reason or connection to what came before?Continue Reading …