Grade: C+

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who played Tommy, the teen much older than his years in the sitcom “3rd Rock from the Sun,” has grown into a remarkable young actor. Not long ago he gave a ferociously vibrant performance as a violent student committed to a psychiatric institution in “Manic,” a film that overall didn’t match him in quality. Now he offers another outstanding turn as Neil, a young man whose sexual recklessness can be traced back to abuse by a pedophile in his childhood. It’s a courageous, risky performance that matches his earlier promise. And yet “Mysterious Skin,” in which it’s embedded, proves even less successful a showcase than “Manic” was; indeed, as it turns out his excellence here is a nearly isolated phenomenon.

The subject of pedophilia, of course, has become more frequent in film and television ever since it’s become an increasingly prevalent concern in real-life. One need only think of the many episodes of TV crime shows that use it as a plot crux, even if the treatment there is usually perfunctory at best. On the big screen it’s fared better: both “Happiness” and “L.I.E.” have dealt with it in a way both mature and compelling. But while Gregg Araki certainly doesn’t treat the subject lightly or crudely, neither does he integrate it into a narrative that works as a whole; despite the suggestion of the title and the convoluted structure of the picture, there’s really very little mystery about what lurks beneath this “Skin.”

The central problem may well originate in the Scott Heim novel which Araki has adapted, but whatever the case his script is devised as a couple of separate stories that ultimately converge at the close. It follows two boys, Brian Lackey and Neil McCormick, from their time as eight-year old tykes on the same small-town Kansas little league team, over the course of a decade. Brian (George Webster), a timid, bespectacled lad whose mother (Lisa Long) is extremely protective and whose father (Chris Mulkey) is nearly contemptuous of the shy, reserved kid, grows up to become a nervous, rather geeky young man (Brady Corbet) who believes that his childhood blackouts and nosebleeds can be explained by only one thing–his presumed abduction, perhaps repeatedly, by aliens. This certitude leads him to make contact with Avalyn (Mary Lynn Rajskub), a crippled young woman who has her own abduction story to tell and can perhaps help him remember his experience.

Meanwhile Neil (Chase Ellison), who lives alone with his promiscuous mother (Elisabeth Shue), becomes the prey of their coach (Bill Sage), who uses friendship, toys and gifts to lure the boy to become his sexual plaything. It’s perhaps not surprising that Neil grows into a free-wheeling libertine (Gordon-Levitt), prostituting himself to older men trolling the local parks and cavalierly indulging in drugs. Neil’s departure to join his long-time pal Deborah (Michelle Trachtenberg) in New York just happens to coincide with Brian’s efforts to find him, convinced that his old teammate holds the key to his own childhood trauma. During his absence Brian grows close to Neil’s best buddy, the gay (and goth) Eric (Jeff Licon) while both await Neil’s return for a Christmas visit, when Brian hopes he’ll provide the answers to his questions. (Hint: he does.)

Throughout all this, Gordon-Levitt scorches the screen with his portrait of a carelessly self-destructive kid; his scenes with tricks Charlie (Richard Riehle), John (John Ganun) and Zeke (Billy Drago) are remarkable. But he’s acting pretty much in a vacuum here. Apparently Araki doesn’t have much aptitude in coaxing convincing work from less experienced performers, because while Trachtenberg, Shue, Riehle, Mulkey and Drago comes off reasonably well, the remainder of the cast are decidedly amateurish. Corbet strikes a very different figure from the one he played in “Thunderbirds,” but his nerdiness seems false and calculated, while Sage appears to be creating a caricature as the libidinous coach and Licon is simply embarrassing as the flamboyant Eric. Even they, however, come off reasonably well compared to Rajskub and Long, neither of whom seems capable of reciting a single line convincingly. In their defense, it must be said that the script does them no favors; most of the dialogue has the stilted tone even the best actors would find it impossible to bring to life. Presumably Araki was striving for a black comic effect in many of the less credible sequences–a sort of soap-opera send-up effect–but he never hits the target. (To see a film that does, check out Bob Balaban’s “Parents” from 1989.) Steve Gainer’s cinematography, which too often accentuates overbright colors and an almost plastic veneer, doesn’t quite fit, either.

So “Mysterious Skin” doesn’t manage to get much beneath the surface of its provocative topic, but Gordon-Levitt compensates considerably by digging deep into the soul of his character. Whether he’s enough to justify the film as a whole, however, is doubtful.

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.