10 Times Hollywood Failed To Adapt World Cinema
6. Oldboy (2013)
It is difficult to understand why Spike Lee bothered to remake Park Chan-wook’s dark masterpiece in the first place. 2003’s Oldboy is a classic in Korean cinema, and had already infiltrated the west by 2013 - frankly, there was just no need for an American interpretation anyway.
But Lee went ahead and, uncharacteristically, he made a bad film. What made the original stand out was its bleakness – a bleakness that stayed with you for weeks after the credits rolled - but in Lee’s adaptation, the whole thing feels contrived.
It's bloody, has decent fight sequences and Josh Brolin plays a broken man well enough, but there's none of the unhinged nightmarish quality that made the original to be Park Chan-wook’s magnum opus.
If you haven’t seen either, just watch the original.