Despite striking visuals and Josh Brolin’s all-in performance, the new “Oldboy” fails to build a riveting, believable mystery strong enough to support its big twist.
In the Spike Lee film, Brolin stars as Joe Doucett, a deplorable advertising executive who has all the time in the world to drown himself in alcohol, but none to spend with his daughter. During one particularly drunken night, Joe is snatched off the street and wakes up trapped in a small room. After 20 years of solitary confinement and dumplings, Joe is suddenly released and challenged to figure out who ordered his lengthy prison sentence and why.
If you’ve seen the Chan-wook Park original, it’s impossible to experience this new version objectively, but Lee’s rendition does deserve a standalone assessment first.
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Elizabeth Olsen has maintained a steady stream of work since her indie hit, Martha Marcy May Marlene, but with films like Godzilla and The Avengers: Age of Ultron on the way, Olsen is going to hit a whole new level and she’s about to begin that progression up with the highly anticipated remake of Oldboy. Olsen steps in as Marie Sebastian, a volunteer nurse who comes face to face with Josh Brolin’s Joe Doucett shortly after wrapping up his 20-year stint in solitary confinement. Even though Joe is understandably rattled and rather off-putting, he strikes a cord with Marie and she agrees to help him assimilate. The thing is, in order to do that, she’ll have to dive into the vicious mystery that’s been plaguing him for the past 20 years of his life.
Apparently Elizabeth Olsen likes a good challenge. She solidified herself as a rising star in the harrowing psychological drama Martha Marcy May Marlene and now she’s opted to put herself through nearly 90 minutes of pure horror in Silent House. She stars as Sarah, a young woman helping her father pack up their family’s lakeside retreat. It’s all stuffing away old memories and trying to fix the bumps and bruises the house endured over the year until Sarah hears a noise that’s definitely not coming from the aging foundation.
I had to do a one-take exercise in film school and while it seemed like far less work, cutting out the large majority of the editing process, it actually turned out to be quite the opposite. Before you can even shoot, you need to go through extensive rehearsals, both for performance and blocking. Lucky for me, my shoot was a mere exercise, so typical fine tuning issues never came into play, but director Chris Kentis and Laura Lau undoubtedly had their work cut out for them when making Silent House, not only having to overcome all the caveats that come with making a movie that appears to play out in a single take, but also elevating the technique from being labeled a mere gimmick.
Sure it’s fun to see fugitives make daring escapes, characters have overemotional breakdowns and others dodge a barrage of bullets, but if you’re looking for something along those lines that’s far more realistic, writer-director Sean Durkin does a notable job taking the standard elements of your average psychological thriller, compressing them and letting Elizabeth Olsen bring the remainder to life. The result is Martha Marcy May Marlene and it’s a feature film that packs far more tension and emotion than any shoot ‘em up, mind game action flick out there.