He joins up with a drug clinic worker played by Elizabeth Olsen and slowly begins piecing together the identity of his jailer: a rich and rather effete sadist ( Sharlto Copley of " District 9") who knew Joe a long time ago, and who now lives like a drug dealer from an '80s cop thriller. Where the film's first half is a Kafka-esque fable of guilt and punishment, the second is a riff on the criminal revenge flick, with Joe working his way through the underbelly of a New York City that's been reimagined as a landscape of the mind.
After seeming eons of self-pity capped by a suicide attempt, he starts a Travis Bickle-like regimen of Spartan self-improvement, winnowing himself down into a lean, mean killer, and finally escaping to seek vengeance against his tormentor. He stays there for twenty years (five more than in Park's version). Joe finds himself trapped in a jail cell made up to look like a hotel suite, getting mysterious updates on the room's TV about the life of the daughter that he never got to know. We sense that his alcoholism is a symptom of long-held guilt that will be explained as the tale unfolds, and we're more right than we could imagine. Drink is ruining his life and estranging him from his wife and newborn daughter. From certain angles he looks and sounds like the young Nick Nolte: a brutish alpha male gone to seed, but not without a certain tenderness. Bruce Hornsby contributes a score in a Bernard Herrmann vein, an instrumental chorus to the modern urban version of a Greek tragedy.Īs Joe, the alcoholic ad executive, Brolin is a raw nerve at first-a bloated and haggard man whose smile and laugh are false. The camera goes much lower or much higher than you expect it to, and peers at the characters from disorienting angles. The lighting is dark but the colors are supersaturated, especially in scenes with a lot of blood, neon, or wet pavement. Like Park's version, this one's a reptilian brain film, all violence and sex and fear and revenge and crying and screaming. He gets clean in prison, then escapes to learn the identity of his tormentor and punish him. Like Park's version, "Oldboy" tells of a drunken, abusive lout named Joe Doucette ( Josh Brolin) who's imprisoned for a long time by a mysterious jailer.
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