a review of 老男孩

MANNVANUARY FOUR: Knowing that Spike Lee kind of disowned this one (amending it to a "Spike Lee *Film*" rather than a "Spike Lee Joint") after the producers cut it down to 105 minutes from the original 140-minute running time makes me feel a bit better, but only a bit. I have to assume that the extra 35 minutes includes a whole bunch of scenes that don't directly involve Elizabeth Olson's character or paint a giant circle around her basically telegraphing the movie's punch line, for what I'm guessing were the tiny number of people who watched this one *without* watching the original. Lee throws a few new curves into the plot, but in the end it's just details because otherwise it's just Oldboy made with an offputting Hollywood gloss that misunderstands the original just enough to miss the point. When the hammer/hallway fight scene happens in this movie, instead of the gritty slog in Park's film where Oh Dae-su basically staggers through the whole thing getting knocked down and picking himself up again like a man possessed, we see Josh Brolin basically walk through the same scenario on god-mode with smooth Hollywood fight choreography like a Jackie Chan film. The whole movie is kind of like that, occasionally echoing the more idiosyncratic bits of Park's film but never quite matching them.