Tuesday’s Top Trailer: Oldboy

Welcome to a weekly feature here at Movies with Abe, Tuesday's Top Trailer. One of my favorite parts about going to see movies is the series of trailers that airs beforehand and, more often than not, the trailer is far better than the actual film. Each week, I'll be sharing a trailer I've recently seen. Please chime in with comments on what you think of the trailer and how you think the movie is going to be.

Oldboy – Opening November 27, 2013

I saw this trailer almost a week ago before “Don Jon” at the AMC Lincoln Square. As I was selecting a preview to write about for this feature, I couldn’t get this one out of my head. It’s especially interesting because my opinion of the film and my expectations about it changed at the end of the trailer. At first, it seemed to me like one of the many films that has come out in recent years about wronged men hell bent on revenge that I haven’t bothered to see, like “Death Sentence,” and even more disturbing because of the unbearable length of the predicament in which its main character finds himself. Seeing Spike Lee’s names on the credits is a big enough draw, if only for the fact that he does choose intriguing, hot-button projects. This is much more in line with his recent films, like “Miracle at St. Anna” and “Inside Man,” than his earlier work, ambitious projects with one major narrative to tell instead of a handful of plotlines about interacting characters. I never had the chance to see the original “Oldboy,” which I’ve heard is both ultraviolent and excellent, and finding out that this film is in fact a remake of that makes it much more enticing. It’s still an unsettling subject matter, but knowing that the original is supposed to be so good. Josh Brolin is an actor who occasionally comes into contact with good roles, and this may well be one of them. Seeing Elizabeth Olsen in the cast indicates that she continues to make smart role decisions, and the variety of other actors in the cast – including Samuel L. Jackson, Sharlto Copley, Michael Imperioli, Lance Reddick, Hannah Ware, and Hannah Simone – indicate that this is a project on which people really wanted to work. I’m not sure if I’ll want to see it, but it does look like one thought-provoking and involving head trip.