Revenge is a dish best served twice.
The first trailer for Spike Lee’s “Oldboy” remake has finally been unleashed and its violent, hyper-real style and dark mystery may look a bit familiar.
A faithful-looking remake of Park Chan-Wook’s 2003 cult Korean film of the same name (based on a manga story), “Oldboy” appears to be Lee at his most commercially-minded and features a stellar cast including Josh Brolin, Samuel L. Jackson (sporting another in a long line of bizarre haircuts), Elizabeth Olsen and Sharlto Copley.
After being mysteriously imprisoned by a faceless enemy for 20 long years, Joe (Brolin) is released into the world and teams with a young woman (Olsen) to get revenge on his captor, only to uncover some ugly truths about the world, and himself. Fans of the original film are advised not to give away the story’s startling, staggering twists.
The remake’s new red band trailer earns its color with plenty of sex, nudity, and hammer-powered violence (it’s hard to believe that this was at one point planned as a Will Smith vehicle). Yep, Park’s hallway hammer scene looks like its been faithfully re-enacted. In short, it’s NSFW.
Watch the trailer above.
Brolin has done both badass and vulnerable in the past, but can he reach the same fearless heights as Choi Min-sik’s exhaustive performance in the original? Likewise, Lee has reined in his frequent tendencies to go overlong and overly melodramatic before (notably on the straightforward thriller “Inside Man”), and may have found the right balance of flash and eccentricity here, but will Hollywood subdue the original’s dark tendencies too much?
“Oldboy” opens October 25.
Now that you’ve seen the trailer, were Brolin and Spike Lee the right choices for the remake?