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.

Grade: C+

It’s entirely fitting that John Woo should have been called
upon to direct this second installment in the series based on
the old TV series: the script by Robert Towne (who once wrote
pieces like “Chinatown” and “Shampoo” rather than such mindless
fluff) is like Woo’s earlier “Face/Off” squared; the hero
and the villain change their appearances so frequently (and
so ludicrously) via the use of “state-of-the-art” latex masks
that one can never be entirely sure who’s really reciting
the dialogue or taking the bullet.

But unlike “Face/Off” or Woo’s other John Travolta-starrer
“Broken Arrow,” or most of his Hong Kong oeuvre for that
matter, “Mission: Impossible 2” is played extremely straight,
with little of the leavening of humor that might make the
absurd material more palatable. Since the director remains a
master of controlled, balletic mayhem, the outcome has a
certain stylishness and sheen, but the picture is like a
beautifully-wrapped package with nothing to speak of inside.

This time around Towne appears to have taken to heart the
criticism that the previous “Mission” film, for which he was
only one of the scribes, had a plot so convoluted as to be
well-nigh incomprehensible. In this instance he’s cobbled
together a fairly simple, straightforward narrative about an
assignment given our stalwart hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) to
retrieve from a greedy turncoat colleague named Sean (Dougray
Scott) a destructive bio-engineered virus stolen from a
pharmaceutical firm. The effort involves him with a beautiful
thief named Nyah (Thandie Newton), a former squeeze of Sean’s,
whom he recruits for his team and inevitably falls for.
Though there are some twists and turns along the way and many
action set-pieces, the plot runs pretty much runs a direct
course to the final bravura showdown between the two men in
which–you guessed it–Nyah’s survival hangs in the balance.

Though it boasts some of the trappings of the TV show (the use
of disguises, most obviously), “Mission: Impossible 2” actually
plays more like an Americanized version of a James Bond movie.
The series was a real ensemble piece, with the company of
players regularly involved in an intricately-constructed,
duplicitous scheme to fool some bad guy into making a fatal
mistake. Here, however (as in the previous screen incarnation),
the story is mostly a one-man show, with the invincible star
using a few underlings but mostly his hands, feet and
innumerable guns to undermine the villain’s dastardly plot
through outrageous break-ins and lots of bone-crunching
fisticuffs.

Cruise doesn’t really fit this rather blank action-star mold terribly well, but he’s certainly buffed up for the part and carries off the various kung-fu interludes and chase sequences with reasonable elan, if too little a sense of fun. Scott is too lightweight a performer to generate the sense of menace his part requires (the absence of a truly formidable villain has weakened recent Bond flicks, too), but he tries to snarl efficiently. Newton is a gorgeous screen presence, whose enigmatic face Woo plays nicely with, but she can’t muster the tone of refined, Grace Kelly-like mystery (think of “To Catch a Thief,” for instance) that the film is
apparently aiming at in her character; and audiences will probably find her self-sacrificial inclinations at the close more risible than affecting.

The other two members of Hunt’s team are played by Ving Rhames and John Polson, both of whom are quite wasted–Rhames in being forced to spend most of his screen time in front of a dreary laptop computer, talking over a microphone, and Polson in desperately trying to provide
some comic relief without any material to do it with. Brendan
Gleeson is surprisingly anonymous as the head of the drug firm
involved in producing the virus (and also, as it turns out,
Sean’s primary mark), as is Richard Roxburgh as Sean’s second-
in-command, a character much less interesting than its
obvious model, Martin Landau’s slimy, sexually ambiguous
Leonard in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (yet
another nod to a performer who was part of the original
“Mission” ensemble, no doubt). Anthony Hopkins has a couple
of brief unbilled scenes as Hunt’s boss (I almost wrote “M”);
he smirks knowingly and cocks his head to one side in a
simulation of acting, but fools nobody thereby.

And that leaves Woo. The director manages to keep the plot
nicely clear throughout (something that Brian De Palma, great
craftsman though he is, didn’t manage in the initial episode
of the series), as well as including a few of his own personal
visual flourishes (lots of pigeons flying about in underground
tunnels in one climactic scene); and he and cinematographer
Jeffrey L. Kimball have given the whole picture a gleaming,
lustrous look that’s continually eye-catching. He’s also
staged the action sequences with predictable aplomb–lots of
flying glass here, saturated with deep blues and purples;
plenty of chopsocky pummeling there; and a motorcycle-and-
car chase toward the close, replete with flaming burnouts and
near-misses, that’s pulled off with virtuoso flair. (In this
respect, too, he’s succeeded far better than De Palma.)

But there are few of the iconoclastic undercurrents that marked his
best previous work: no self-referential humorous winks, and
certainly none of the operatic but oddly effective emotionalism
one felt in his Hong Kong classics. It’s not for lack of
trying: Woo obviously wants some of the bits to have an
amusing charge, and he strains at the close to give weight
to Nyah’s unfortunate situation. The problem is that Cruise
is simply too leaden a presence to generate the compensatory
sense of lightness that Chow Yun-Fat could effortlessly embody
even in the midst of the most raging violence and grief
(Cruise has a charming smile, sure, but it always seems to be
directed at others rather than himself), and the Cruise-
Newton relationship never achieves the sort of tragic dimension
that could give the concluding showdown the gonzo depth that
the director is famous for. As with so much of “Mission:
Impossible II,” therefore, the director’s achievement is just
a surface one. Still, the picture is Woozy enough, even on
the level of mere appearances, to keep the eye engaged, if not
the mind; and as explosive summer blockbusters go, it’s more
attractive and exciting than most. (It’s certainly preferable
to the limp Brosnan Bond efforts.)

It may be noted, finally, that Paramount’s advertising scheme
makes “Mission: Impossible II” one of those rare flicks that
are identified by simple abbreviation–here, “M:I-2” (an
apparent imitation of what worked for the “Terminator” sequel).
A pity that the same drive for shortening couldn’t have been
applied in the editing process, too: at slightly more than two
hours, the picture runs a little overlong, and some judicious
cutting would not have been amiss.