After a staggering 20 years of captivity, as expressed by news clip mash-ups, Doucett is packed away in a crate and finally freed with a brand-new iPhone, an envelope full of cash, sunglasses, and not much else. His wife has been brutally murdered and his daughter has been turned over to the authorities as a ward of the state. Joe is abandoned, adrift, and wanted by the police. However, Joe has a singular, all-consuming goal: find the person who ruined his life and get revenge. The one-two punch of Sharlto Copley and Josh Brolin in full melodrama mode is more than enough to guarantee an experience completely different from the Korean version of Oldboy, but adding in the directorial touch of Spike Lee pushes it to a whole new level. Not one for subtlety here, Lee and company take every moment and blow it up to gigantic proportions. Brolin’s breakdowns are full-on sobs. Every smack of the hammer is punctuated with a scream or a gross meaty crunch. Lee brings a few clever touches to this film, sneaking in a cool-looking first-person dolly shot thing and providing some other interesting camera movements, though for the most part things feel pretty static, even safe, from a style standpoint. It’s as if Lee doesn’t want to get in the way of his material, though when it matters most, he still manages to stumble a bit. If you’ve seen the original version of Oldboy, then Mark Protosevich’s script won’t contain many surprises. It sticks fairly close to the original in terms of story, though it does differ in some interesting ways. This film spends a little more time on Doucett prior to his kidnapping, and there are other little changes along the way, most of them done to either A) wink at fans of the original film or B) make the Asian-centric original a little more American and palatable to westerners. All the twists and turns in the story remain, as does its central premise; there are some changes at key points, but they never detract from the story as a whole. It can be a little goofy sometimes, particularly in the hands of Samuel L Jackson, but the comedic touch ends up being a nice break from the grimness of the captivity scenes; when Michael Imperioli’s Chucky explains how to use Google to Doucett or when Doucett complains loudly about the lack of Yellow Pages and public phone booths to Marie, it’s both a reminder of how long he spent locked away and a much-needed laugh line. Oldboy is out in UK cinemas on the 6th December. US Correspondent Ron Hogan has a fondness for Elizabeth Olsen, Josh Brolin, and Sharlto Copley. If you like people doing interesting things, you should be too. Find more by Ron daily at Shaktronics and PopFi. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.