Blood Feud or Broken Heart: How Oldboy Undoes the Revenge Fantasy

If you’re a movie fan, you know how revenge flicks usually go. Whether it’s John Wick, Kill Bill, The Crow, or anything else in this genre, they all follow the same basic formula. A character lives a (mostly) normal, happy life; someone wrongs him; and the protagonist wreaks bloody vengeance against his enemies. It’s the same story every time, so when you sit down to watch a revenge film, you generally know what to expect.

But when you watch Oldboy, you can throw those expectations out the window. Sure, the movie follows the typical genre blueprint for most of its runtime, but the third act turns that template completely on its head. Oldboy actually ends up being an anti-revenge film, so it provides an important counterbalance to the movies that typically populate this genre. It tells us in no uncertain terms that vengeance is wrong, so let’s take a deep dive into this Korean cult classic and see just how it conveys its important message.

Setting the Stage
When Oldboy begins, its protagonist, Oh Dae-su, leads a relatively unremarkable life. He’s a businessman with a wife and daughter, but soon after we first meet him, his entire existence gets upended in just about the worst way possible. The night of his daughter’s fourth birthday, the guy is kidnapped and thrown into a sealed hotel room, and he’s forced to stay there for fifteen years.

During his entire captivity, Dae-su never learns who locked him up or why, and he has no contact with the outside world other than a small television that helps keep him sane. Unfortunately, that TV isn’t quite enough, so he teaches himself martial arts by practicing against a wall in his hotel room. He also tries to dig his way out of this unconventional prison, but before he can complete his tunnel, his captor suddenly lets him go.

Somewhat surprisingly, Dae-su still doesn’t know who this mysterious kidnapper is even after he's freed, but he’s determined to find out. He meets and falls in love with a beautiful sushi chef named Mi-do, and together, they slowly track down the man who took fifteen years of Dae-su’s life. The guy wants his revenge, and nothing is going to stand in his way.

That’s the basic setup of Oldboy, and as I’m sure you can tell, it’s pretty standard for the revenge genre. It’s basically John Wick with a fifteen-year imprisonment instead of a dead dog, so the first time you watch this film, you’d be forgiven for expecting Dae-su to get the vengeance he so desperately seeks.

And if you dig a little bit deeper, you'll also find some subtler clues that Oldboy is going to follow the typical vengeance blueprint. For starters, when Dae-su is finally freed from his captivity, he looks like a legit action hero. Everything about the guy, from his hair to his clothes to the way he carries himself, gives off an unmistakable, almost tangible aura that can only be described as BA, and I don't mean bachelor of arts. It’s tough to put it into words if you’ve never seen the movie, but when you watch it, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

You just know Dae-su is a dangerous man, and when he finally gets to show off his fighting skills, he does not disappoint. He plows through numerous enemies multiple times, so there’s no doubt in your mind that he’s the real deal. He proves himself more than capable of completing his mission, so you have every reason to believe he actually will.

Turning the Tables
But surprisingly, Oldboy doesn’t turn out that way. Like I said before, this ends up being an anti-revenge film, and it conveys that unexpected message in a number of ways. To see how, let’s begin with Dae-su’s mysterious tormentor. Our protagonist eventually learns that he was kidnapped by a man named Lee Woo-jin, an old classmate of his, and he also finds out why Woo-jin had him locked up for fifteen years.

Back when these men were in school, Dae-su saw Woo-jin committing incestuous acts with his sister, and after he told one of his friends about it, rumors and gossip about the incestuous couple began to circulate among their fellow students. This eventually led Woo-jin’s sister to commit suicide, and as you might be able to guess, Woo-jin blamed the poor girl’s death on the kid who saw them.

Even as an adult, he still harbored a grudge against Dae-su, so he used his considerable wealth to get revenge. He had the man kidnapped and locked away for over a decade, and that raises serious moral questions for us viewers. For most of Oldboy, we see Dae-su as the good guy and Woo-jin as the bad guy, but they’re essentially two sides of the same coin. They’re both seeking vengeance for egregious wrongs they’ve suffered, so if Dae-su is justified in his quest for revenge, Woo-jin must be as well.

But anybody who’s seen Oldboy knows that can’t be right. Woo-jin is indisputably evil, so there’s really only one conclusion we can draw. We’re forced to acknowledge that vengeance itself is wrong, so even though we initially sympathized with Dae-su, we have no choice but to admit that his pursuit of vengeance is just as indefensible as Woo-jin’s.

What Really Matters
That’s already enough to make Oldboy an anti-revenge film, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The real point of this story comes later on, when Dae-su confronts his tormentor for the last time. He finds out that his girlfriend, Mi-do, is actually his long-lost daughter and that Woo-jin had them both hypnotized so they would fall in love with each other. It’s a disgusting turn of events you almost certainly didn’t see coming, and when Dae-su learns this appalling truth, Woo-jin threatens to have one of his men tell Mi-do as well.

That threat takes all the fight out of Dae-su, and he immediately forgets about his pursuit of vengeance. The man drops to his knees and begs forgiveness for what he did all those years ago, and he asks Woo-jin to spare Mi-do the burden of this horrible knowledge. He even acts like a dog and cuts his tongue off as a gruesome penance, and to his relief, Woo-jin eventually accepts his apology.

On the surface, this grisly third act may seem like little more than an exercise in gratuitous repulsiveness, but upon deeper reflection, we find that it's actually incredibly meaningful. See, before learning the truth about his relationship with Mi-do, Dae-su was consumed by his quest for vengeance. At one point in Oldboy, he even tells Mi-do that he can’t abandon his mission, saying, “Seeking revenge has become a part of me.”

However, once the woman he loves is put in danger, Dae-su shows that he actually can let it go. He realizes that protecting Mi-do in the present is more important than seeking revenge for the wrongs of the past, and that realization holds an important lesson for us as well. Like all evil, the pursuit of vengeance can become addictive, but it has an antidote: love.

In other words, Dae-su’s story doesn’t just tell us that revenge is wrong. It also highlights a much greater good that’s infinitely more deserving of our time and effort. Oldboy shows us that caring for our loved ones is unquestionably more important than getting back at the people who’ve hurt us, so despite wearing the trappings of a typical revenge flick, this is actually a deep and thematically rich anti-revenge film.