Fight scenes in recent movies are terrible.  Action is overwhelming and never ending.  Pfft… CGI.  Even when the action is real, the camera can never hold on one shot long enough to figure out what’s going on.  Hundreds of camera angles and ever changing shots drown the audience in euphoric asphyxiation, giving the audience that wonderful fleeting feeling of flimsy consciousness.

Those phony movie makes aughta be hanged.  I’d sure like to throw a rotten carrot or two at em.  Possibly pierce an orifice with one luckily aimed carrot to pollute their systems with some insipid unnamable plague.

It is a disgrace.  And I’m fed up with it.

But instead of seeking solace in the infamous and legendary films of lost ages, I will turn to the 2003 South Korean thriller Oldboy.

What makes Oldboy standout?

Well let’s start with the action in terms Robert Ebert might appreciate.

The scene has three minutes of excellent choreography.  And it’s all in one shot.  You rarely can go wrong when you have a shot go on for longer than a minute.

The movement is forward.  It’s positive.  The main character fights his way through a dark hallway from the left, going from the past to the future.  Moreover, the impossibility of the odds is negotiated by the camera giving the scene a side scroller appearance.  A game like feeling is given, letting the craziness of the action unfold in way that seems plausible.

Letting the main character fight for this long in one scene also injects perseverance into the main character.   The scene is key, in developing all that he will face and do.  Even with a knife in his back, he will not relent.

Action isn’t everything.  At the end of the movie, a well done scene seamlessly brings the villain into his past, reliving the defining moment of his life.  The scene shows how little nuances can give a scene much more depth.

[I suggest not watching past 1:40 because of mild violence and and spoilers]

The camera, pans up, framing the villain as godlike for a moment.  The angle, however, plays on perception as he is hurdled into his past and holding his sister on the precipice of disaster.

Beautifully done, the camera dangling from the villain’s neck is used as the perspective for the movie, capturing her in her last moment.  The left tilt of the angle giving that sense of hopelessness.

Beyond the cinematography,  Oldboy is a tragedy.  There is the fall of a great man due to his own mistakes.  His heroism is unquestionable, and his fall unmistakable. Yet more the being a tragedy, Oldboy subverts the genre. The audience is caught up in a classic romance between two strangers and the strength of the hero to overcome.

Then the bait and switch occurs.  The audience is turned upside down.  They can’t deny what they wanted to happen.  Feign  disbelief all you want, you can’t rid yourself of the filmy disgust that isn’t just popcorn grease covering your right hand.  They think all will be resolved.  It’s a hoax. No.  Really.   It must be a hoax.

But it is not.  All we are left is with our twisted desires,  a salty, bitter taste in our mouth.  We feel victims as much as the hero.

This movie hinges on a gambit.  A gambit that could easily ruin any other film.   And yet it works because the entirety of the film from cinematography to acting to the musical scores flow so well even though the trope is switched and the audience left betrayed.