In “Oldboy,” drunken lout, lousy ex-husband and absent father Joe Doucett finds himself held captive in a hotel-like cell for 20 years. When he’s released — as mysteriously as he was imprisoned — he has two aims: to find out who tormented him and to learn why.
Make that three goals: to also exact revenge.
One of the things that makes director Spike Lee such a vital cultural figure is that he has never been a style-over-substance kind of guy. Until “.”
The revenge fable written by Mark Protosevich has a genealogy not entirely suited to Lee’s better gifts.
Before it became the second installment in South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s vengeance trilogy — along with “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance” — it was a Japanese graphic novel. won the Cannes film fest’s grand jury prize in 2004.
Lee’s talent for getting a harrowing turn from a lead male actor is what distinguishes this otherwise inconsequential outing.
As the caddish ad exec, Josh Brolin gives a naked performance. Sometimes literally. He’s required to be vulgar, then bestial, then nearly psychotic once he returns to the world. Brolin meets those demands head on.
Sorely, Elizabeth Olsen doesn’t fare as well as Marie, the medical-aid worker who takes an interest in the dangerous and endangered Doucett. So good in the unnerving “” and able in the horror remake “Silent House,” the actress is marooned by a clunky, oddly disinterested script.
Things become mildly more interesting once South African actor Sharlto Copley arrives as Doucett’s enigmatic tormentor if only because he promises the “why” will be eventually if preposterously addressed.
Frustration with “Oldboy” is not a matter of an indie auteur teasing different genres. Lee brought ideas, pleasure and enough of his personality to “Inside Man” and “25th Hour” to make them a legit part of his oeuvre.
And there is a clever touch or two here. A piece of artwork in Doucett’s sleek jail cell depicts a broadly smiling bellhop who looks an awful lot like a younger version of a Lee regular. It’s no surprise then when Samuel L. Jackson arrives in full-throated mode as the mohawk-sporting sadist who runs the Kafkaesque prison.
Still, try as he might, Lee cannot repurpose this empty genre tale to be deeper than it is.
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, lkennedy@denverpost.com, twitter.com/bylisakennedy
