re: I watched Oldboy for the first time last night...

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How did the remake fail, if you don't mind? I haven't made it a priority to watch, and I probably won't.

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The most common criticisms I read involved how watered-down and pointless the remake was. It wasn't nearly as provocative or captivating as the original, and I think they even tweaked a couple of key plot points to make it palatable for American audiences.

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Film.com David Ehrlich

A slumming Spike Lee is still better than most directors at the top of their game, but Oldboy isn't just Lee's worst movie, it's practically his “Wicker Man”.

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New York Post Lou Lumenick

The feel-bad movie of the holiday season, Spike Lee's often-repellent Americanized reimagining of Korean director Chan-Wook Park's twisty 2004 revenge thriller Oldboy is relentlessly gruesome, self-consciously shocking and pretty much pointless.

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Slant Magazine Jesse Cataldo

Spike Lee's version loses the one thing that really worked in the original, the sense of moral complication emerging out of the intertwined action of two men hell-bent on retribution.

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I saw the original first just to make a comparison and this was a really clumsy remake. All the subtleties of the original were bulldozed with obvious plot points that the original only gave away at the end. As twisted as the story is, I actually cared about the characters in the original. Spike really should have spent a little more time developing the main characters and maybe this would have worked. Really disappointed

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Terrible movie, completely detracts from the original manga and has lots of gaps. Just because Samuel L. Jackson appears give it a 3. And do not misunderstand me, not for being a remake is bad, is that they changed the whole plot and nothing makes sense.

I still believe that this movie was made just for that 5 year olds understand. Not everything has to be explained, we must appeal to deductive capacity Mr. Lee.

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The remake remains largely faithful to the story of the 2003 effort, but seriously lacks in intensity and a sense of meaning. The original film achieves a sublime blending of ultra-violence with extreme art, while the remake feels bogged down in its copycat status, and its overall lighter tone hampers its enigmatic, disconcerting story of revenge. My advice is to avoid this altogether, pull up the original on Netflix, and deal with the subtitles America.

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