C+

James Mangold’s biopic of singer Johnny Cash has been called this year’s “Ray,” and that turns out to be a pretty fair description of it–or at least of what it tries to be. If you wanted to be flip about it, you might say that while “Ray” was a film about a music icon who was black, “Walk the Line” is one about the icon called the man in black. But to speak more seriously, the basic similarity is that they’re both very conventional Hollywood musical biographies, structured pretty much the same way similar movies would have been back in 1945 or 1959 and presented without a great deal of imagination or any special insight. Both are also notable for the uncannily accurate performances in the lead roles–by Jamie Foxx in “Ray,” of course, and here by both Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter (though in neither case would they have been the first names you’d have thought of for those parts). And they’re also likely to be remembered at Oscar time, at least in terms of nominations if not for the statuettes themselves, as Foxx was.

But “Walk the Line” doesn’t match “Ray,” not because it’s any less a slickly professional job but because Cash’s story just isn’t as compelling as Ray Charles’s. With the latter you had not only the man’s emergence from impoverished beginnings but his overcoming blindness, too; and in addition to his inveterate womanizing, his heavy drug usage and his dealings with record companies, there was the racial issue that put the singer-pianist in the context of the most significant element of social change occurring in the country. Cash had troubles in his life, too, but it would be absurd to say that they were in any way the equal of those Charles faced. As depicted here, in a script by Mangold and Gill Dennis based on Cash’s own autobiographical books (which may be the fundamental problem), he must deal with childhood trauma resulting from the death of his beloved older brother (Lucas Till) and the stern, unloving attitude of his alcoholic father (Robert Patrick). And his singing career will not only take a toll on his marriage to his early sweetheart Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin) but introduce him to the woman who was his true soul-mate and became his real love–singer Carter (Witherspoon), who resisted his advances for years but finally became his second wife. (In fact, the movie seems to be essentially a two-hour difficult courtship.) Cash also had a serious drug problem that threatened his professional and personal well-being. But if you stack up Cash’s troubles against Charles’s, they come off seeming pretty minor. It may even be a shock to learn that despite his famous song from the perspective of a prisoner, Cash never served hard time; he did give a famous concert for the Folsom inmates, but that’s hardly the same thing.

That doesn’t mean that “Walk the Line” isn’t enjoyable, in a modest way. It includes a lot of Cash’s and Carter’s music, which is all to the good, and certainly Phoenix and Witherspoon prove engaging, even remarkable performers, going well beyond mere impersonation. But despite their excellence, the film never goes terribly deep beneath the surface of things; perhaps because it’s based on the singer’s own memoirs, it seems curiously superficial in its depiction of his dreams as well as his troubles. Of course, perhaps what we see here is pretty much all there was. But if so, the Johnny Cash so many people idolize and revere would appear to be more a triumph of showmanship than of reality. Nor is Carter explained any better. She’s resolutely chipper in spite of the fact that she has marital problems; in fact, her biggest crisis seems to arise when the conservative fans of her family puritanically sneer at her for insulting the sanctity of marriage by getting divorced (the movie is especially ham-fisted on this score). Somehow Phoenix and Witherspoon go beyond the blandness of the screenplay to suggest deeper currents in Cash and Carter, but they can’t do it alone.

The supporting cast strikes no particular sparks. Patrick is grim and sour-faced as Cash’s father and Goodwin no better than adequate as the luckless Vivian, while the parade of youngsters who have cameos as other rockers of the era–Tyler Hilton as Elvis Presley, Waylon Malloy Payne as Jerry Lee Lewis, Jonathan Rice as Ray Orbison–seem just like the impersonators they are. Technically the movie is fine, with glossily luxuriant cinematography by Phedon Papamichael and good period production design by David J. Bomba.

But though you’ll probably leave the theatre swinging to the music, this highly conventional movie really doesn’t do its subject justice: it’s a “Ring of Fire” that burns at distressingly low dramatic voltage.

Grade: C+

Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but in what’s perhaps the most memorable–and nauseating–scene in Park Chan-wook’s brutal, intricate new psycho-thriller it’s literally devoured alive, when the protagonist, Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) consumes a squirming octopus, one of whose tentacles grasps the man’s face as the rest of it gets chomped and swallowed. Of course, since Oh Dae-su has only just been released from fifteen years’ solitary confinement at the hands of a mysterious abductor (who’s also framed him for the murder of his wife), the sequence is meant to symbolize his intense need to reconnect with the pulsating world of reality following his long lack of contact. But it also represents his desire to tear the person responsible for his torment limb from limb, and neither of the symbolic purposes makes it any less gross.

That scene, moreover, is only one of the in-your-face (pun intended) episodes in “Oldboy.” At a couple of other points, dental extractions performed with a simple hammer and without benefit of anesthesia are the center of attention, and they make the surgery that Laurence Olivier’s vicious Szell performed on Dustin Hoffman’s Babe Levy in “Marathon Man” seem positively benign by comparison. Then there’s an elaborate sequence, shot almost entirely from one long, largely static perspective, in which Oh Dae-su has at a large gang of thugs with that hammer again, so engaged in his work that he barely slows down when a knife is shoved in his back. Nothing, it seems, will deter the man in his pursuit of the villain he aims to destroy.

All of which is sufficient to demonstrate that “Oldboy” is not a nice movie, and that the squeamish need not apply for admittance. But that doesn’t mean that it lacks admirers. The film won the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year–an award that was admittedly controversial and partially explicable by reason of the fact that the head of the committee was Quentin Tarantino, whose “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” pushed the envelope in similar ways, but it’s still a noteworthy achievement. And even those less enamored of such material than Tarantino must admit that Park is an extremely adroit manipulator of tone and tension: the opening sequence, showing a drunken, uncooperative Oh Dae-su in police custody, is a marvel of gritty, grungy atmosphere, and throughout he exhibits remarkable technical control–the choreography of the action set-pieces is not only masterful overall, but makes each of them distinctive.

But if “Oldboy” succeeds brilliantly as an exercise in revenge fantasy–a sort of Oriental counterpart to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone in which a nameless hero polishes off the bad-guys he’s been hunting for years (although in this case the protagonist is far more flawed than they were)–but it fails almost completely in terms of character and plot. The three main figures in the piece–Oh Dae-su himself; Mido (Gang Hye-jung), a young waitress who befriends and helps him; and Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae), who’s revealed fairly early on as the villain of the piece, with only his motive remaining obscure until the final act–are basically cardboard cliches. Though Oh Dae-su seems to come across as more than that, it’s only because Choi plays him with such a mixture of brooding calm and periodic ferocity; he’s actually quite a blank fellow. The other two make much less positive impressions. Gang is very attractive, but never more than adequate, and Yoo is extraordinarily weak, strutting about with a smirking smugness that makes for a one-note, boring character.

But these figures, vacuous as they are, would have been more palatable in a cleverer script. (After all, Hitchcock’s characters weren’t very deep, but when his plots worked that didn’t make much difference.) “Oldboy,” however, is as ludicrously complex and silly as any of Brian De Palma’s worst thrillers–think of “Body Double” or “Raising Cain” or “Femme Fatale.” (Well, to be fair, it’s not as dumb as “Femme Fatale.” Nothing is.) The very premise of a private jail in which one can lock up an enemy for as long as one likes is the height of implausibility, but even if one accepts it with a straight face, what follows Oh Dae-su’s release is a string of absurd coincidences, incredible investigative leaps and misleading games of one-upsmanship that grow increasingly preposterous. (You know that the nadir has been reached when that hoariest of chestnuts, hypnotism, is dragged in as an explanatory device.) And when the reason behind all the machinations, dating from Oh Dae-su and Lee Wu-jin’s distant past (as suggested by the title), is finally revealed, it invites nothing less than an exasperated “Huh?” (And that doesn’t even take into account the positively unsavory sexual connotations to both men’s actions.)

Of course, coherence and logic have never been absolute requirements in a successful thriller, but there are still boundaries that one knows shouldn’t be crossed, and “Oldboy” goes over them. There will be many who will be willing to forgive the transgression in view of the picture’s technical virtuosity and Park’s unquestionable ability to maintain a dark, menacing mood and fashion some stunning individual sequences. The problem is that all the wizardry doesn’t add up to very much except a flexing of cinematic muscle. Ultimately, “Oldboy” suffers from an excess of filmmaking brawn and a lack of brains.