Oldboy

Directed by Spike Lee

(R)

**

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Spike Lee’s Oldboy is “often puzzling but rarely lifeless,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. A remake of a South Korean film, it will likely leave viewers “swerving between bafflement and mild astonishment, wondering how a movie that works so hard to generate intensity and surprise can feel so bereft of genuine imagination.” It worked for me, said Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly. Josh Brolin gives “a terrific and harrowing performance” as an alcoholic businessman who for mysterious reasons is kidnapped and held in a room for 20 years. When he’s finally released, he’s just a slimeball out for revenge, and the whole drama carries “a perverse, loco charge.” Yet so many scenes, including a gruesome torture sequence, work so effectively that “it’s a huge disappointment when the movie loses its nerve,” said Rene Rodriguez in The Miami Herald. The original Oldboy “ended on a note of beautiful, poetic horror,” but Lee closes his with “a semihappy shrug”—a finale that, in tying up all loose ends, makes this tense, strange picture “easier to forget.”