It’s a tale as old as time, people at home for the holidays are looking for something to watch on Netflix so they check the Top 10 to see what’s popular with everyone else using the service. Maybe you already saw Don’t Look Up and you watched Red Notice when it came out, maybe you’re not up for the time commitment of Titanic, so what about this movie? It’s called Oldboy. You haven’t heard of it but it features plenty of people you know about now thanks to the MCU like Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Olsen, plus Samuel L. Jackson. It must be good, it’s in the Top 10. Then you watched it. Spoilers follow.
Many people seemingly had this very thought process as Spike Lee’s 2013 remake of the South Korean revenge thriller of the same name has been cruising along the bottom half of Netflix’s Top 10 movies for a few days now. Despite being poorly received at time, the film keeps much of the same plot from the original movie and the manga it was based on. In short, a man (Brolin) is kidnapped and imprisoned by an unseen force for reasons unclear, leaving his wife and daughter to believe he’d walked out on them. While stuck in a room for twenty years he plots his revenge, eventually getting out and being able to pursue it. Along the way a young woman (Elizabeth Olsen in this version) comes to his aid and they begin to form a bond, which helps him in finding out who imprisoned him for so long and why.
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The film has a big twist ending which is largely the same as its predecessor, the big one being that the young woman he befriends and takes to bed is actually his adult daughter, alongside many other unpleasant revelations. As one might guess, this isn’t explicitly telegraphed from the movie’s page on Netflix which has left many users….surprised by what they just watched. We’ve collected some of the reactions below.