We were just surmising this morning that the long- reported remake of Park Chan-Wook’s Korean 2003 film, “Oldboy” by the odd pairing of Will Smith and Steven Spielberg appeared to be dead.
Now today, according to the guys at Latino Review (we’ll choose to believe this particular report mostly because we want to desperately), the brutal revenge remake is dead in the water.
This is good news. Not because Park Chan-Wook’s film is too sacred to be touched (but really, it’s an excellent film, why bother trying to improve on it? There are very few flaws), but because the story is rather harrowing and any version that Spielberg and Smith would have made would have been largely sanitized to the point of being unrecognizable.
We won’t spoil the plot if you’ve never seen it, but it’s a longtail conspiratorial revenge story that involves a man being locked up and tortured for 15 years, freed and given clues by his captor and then… well we won’t spoil the twist, but there’s incest involved and the film is rather hyperviolent. It’s also part of Park Chan-Wook’s lauded revenge trilogy which features “Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance,” and “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance” (the latter is our personal fave, but “Oldboy” is a very, very close second).
Spielberg and Smith were reportedly basing their version not on Chan-Wook’s film, but the original manga comic, but the plot is largely the same and with vanilla names like these two superstars…. you can eventually see why they decided there’s no way to properly tell this story without blemishing their careers.
According to Latino Review’s “trusted source”, “Mandate and DreamWorks didn’t see eye to eye therefore DreamWorks has apparently walked away.” Hooray! Let’s move on and never, ever speak of it again.
Here’s an “Oldboy” trailer