It's hard to be an r/movies hypetrain film. There are few more classic examples of Reddit darlings than Oldboy (2003) which shows up in threads from "What's a movie you loved but could never watch again?" to "What's the greatest action scene?" to "What's an underrated international gem?" The fanboy noise only gets louder over time, as director Park Chan-wook's acclaim grows with releases like 2009's vampire drama Thirst, 2016's sexual thriller The Handmaiden, and 2022's romantic mystery Decision to Leave. Moreover, thanks to other directors like Bong Joon-Ho and Lee Chang-dong, Korea's reputation as a home to some really exciting, deranged cinema has been in process for years, and a casual filmgoer could very well point to Oldboy as the international beginning of that reputation. 

But the issue for Reddit hype is that it's so pervasive and repetitive that it can be particularly difficult to live up to. That was my experience watching Oldboy in New York, where it was rereleased in a variety of corporate (e.g., AMC) and independent (e.g., IFC) theaters in celebration of its 20-year anniversary. It's notoriously evasive on streaming sites (even for rental), so the opportunity to watch its 4K restored and remastered version, plus a post-credits interview with Park Chan-wook, was much appreciated. 

Oldboy opens with a fun scene of a riotously drunk middle-aged man being held in a local police station. He causes a lot of trouble for the officers before being bailed out by a friend, just to be abruptly and inexplicably kidnapped. He's placed in a prison cell that looks like a generic motel room, where he's kept while his wife is murdered. The man, named Oh Dae-Su, is unsurprisingly the prime suspect due to his disappearance.

He's kept in confinement for years, regularly drugged into submission and driven mad by solitude. Some time into his imprisonment, his hair long and his psyche nearly at the breaking point, Oh Dae-Su resolves to escape and exact revenge on his invisible captors, and begins a training-and-escape montage that should be familiar to audiences, complete with scratching a concealed hole in the wall. 

Once he escapes, Oh Dae-Su (played well throughout the film with stern resolution by Choi Min-sik) begins pursuing his captor (a rather quickly revealed Yoo Ji-tae, whose handsomeness and suave cordiality belie his evil doings) with the help of a young sushi chef (Kang Hye-jung, who's alright but outclassed by the other two actors).

The film does have its high points, which mostly feature Chan-wook's brutality. An interrogation scene sports visceral sound editing for pulling teeth; a gunshot's effect splatters against an elevator door; a now-famous hallway fight scene is shot with brilliantly claustrophobic sidescrolling mania, even when the protagonist is stabbed and all his attackers are physically exhausted. 

But contrary to what Reddit will have you believe, these scenes are the minority, while the significant majority is a pretty rote story of childhood trauma and revenge. The captor's rationales, regardless of how convincing they are to a viewer, are just not that interesting; the protagonist's supposedly incredible abilities, honed in prison, are forgotten quickly and replaced by blubbering and meandering. And while I am okay forgiving older movies for somewhat regressive gender politics, Oldboy is from the 2000s, so has no excuse for both major female characters being written as boring damsels in distress. It'd be hard to count how many lines of dialogue are men getting mad at each other on behalf of women they're fighting for. Especially given how much violence is ultimately directed at those very women, I found myself rolling my eyes at the machismo. 

The film is obviously capably made, but never pays off its intriguing premise and flashes of gory genius, no matter how much Redditors claim it does. 

("Capably made" is more than can be said for the post-credits interview, though. Park Chan-wook does his absolute best to give interesting, engaged, thoughtful answers, but the choice of Nicolas Winding Refn is a complete misstep. Refn wears shorts to the interview, obviously an inappropriate fashion choice, particularly since the camera angle shows his snow-white knee in seemingly every shot. His outfit is unfortunately even better than his questions, which stumble through basics, like "What do you love about film?", that are reminiscent of an elementary schooler for a class project.)