Whether a movie is a rotten tomato or a brilliant work of art, if people are watching it, it’s worth critiquing. In Spike Lee’s impressive performance using skill without gimmickry, flash without fuss to tap into a mesmerizing 2013 American remake of Park Chan-Wook’s Korean 2003 thriller, “Oldboy”, which is Lee’s most exciting movie since “Inside Man”. Oldboy is a mystery-thriller and just like Park’s version it tells a story of a drunken, abusive lout named Joe Doucette played by Josh Brolin. Brolin who often plays characters with charismatic personalities who show concern for women, yet his role as Joe Doucette is the complete opposite. Brolin brings a sense of someone half-tormented to begin with, a visceral wounded animal quality. In the…show more content… Even though Park’s film is not an original story, but an adaptation of a Japanese comic book, of the same name; Both versions find ways to visually suggest that the audience is reading a big-screen graphic novel with pages that come to life, though key details of the back story have been changed, and the denouement is harsher and sad. Lee restages some famous moments from the original, including the hammer fight, pictured as a more elaborately choreographed scene that unfolds over two levels of a warehouse populated by criminals and ruled by a glowering boss played by Samuel L. Jackson (seemingly channeling his character from unbreakable”). The film changes small details, including specific violent acts and lines of dialogue. The scene in the original in which the hero devours a live octopus is thrown away by having Joe glance at one in a restaurant fish tank. Suffice to say that Lee and his screenwriter Mark Protosevich do a good job of working together. In Matt Zoller Seitz’s observation, the lack of a political dimension seems to have freed Lee to be looser and more cruelly playful than usual. At no point does the film try to be “realistic”, except when it comes to the strong and simple emotions that the character