Have you enough of your quarantine after a month locked in your apartment for the COVID-19 pandemic? Imagine to be imprisoned in a room for 15 years! It is more or less what happened to Oh Dae-su, the protagonist of the live action adaptation of the manga Old Boy.
Despite the differences with the manga, the 2003 film was very successful and the critical response was very positive. The director Park chan-wook and his crew won various awards worldwide at that time.
Old Boy (2003)
Old Boy is a noir action thriller film, consequently the action component is very represented in the whole story. One of the fighting scene in particular become very famous and deserved to be reviewed more in-depth:
The Old Boy fighting scene concerned is located in a corridor and was shot in one motion (about 2.50 minutes non-stop fighting). Oh Dae-su must defeat more than ten guys having only a hammer as weapon. In the first half of the sequence the street fight has good pace until the fake knock down of the protagonist. In the second half instead, the pace is slowing down and Oh Dae-su shows some boxing techniques until the defeat of the last encounter.
This street fighting scene is interesting because of the shoot in one motion. Long one motion shootings of fighting scenes are rare in non martial arts films (specially at that time). The film director Park chan-wook with the protagonist Choi Min-sik and the stunt group did really a good job.
The old boy’s one motion shooting
First of all the pace is slowing down with the time. Like in the reality, people during a fight get tired. So even if they are athletes, the fatigue is really an important component to show. Fortunately, it does not required any acting, they are tired for real!
The second interesting detail is the camera subject. Pay attention to the position of the protagonist and the opponents: Oh Dae-su is starting to the left, then he is in the center of the scene and in the end he is in the right part of the screen. This kind of positioning could be compared with vintage video games, and it is not case! In video games like Super Mario Bros there are not different shots in the gameplay, there is only one view. The solution is to move the character from one side to the other, in order to show an evolution of the scene.
The one motion shooting is really a tricky and painful solution to get, specially for fight scenes. It is enough a wrong move of a stunt or a short bad shift of the camera, that the whole scene has to be shot again. But when all the process is working, the result is just impressive.
Old Boy (2013)
The 2003 Korean adaptation of Old Boy is not the only one, in 2013 the American film director Spike Lee remakes the same movie, this time with the actor Josh Brolin playing the main character.
The street fighting scene is a reinterpretation of the old one also, using the same shooting style. The camera in this scene, even if it is moving in much more direction around the protagonist, it follows always the same concept of one motion. The fighting style this time sacrifices the boxing techniques for random weapons. In this way, it is showed more violence and more power of the hits.
Like said before, the film of Spike Lee do not introduce anything new in terms of story, despite the fact to be a western and modern reinterpretation of the old one and the great performance of the cast.
In conclusion, the Old Boy remake cannot offer anything valuable in term of fighting sequences (everything is done earlier and better in martial arts movies). Instead, the Korean live action adaptation was innovative for its time. But no worries! I am sure that somewhere, someone in a room is thinking about something incredible for more than 15 years.