Metacritic reviews

It's a movie of such jaw-dropping violence, wild improbability and dazzling style it overpowers all resistance.

Whatever its oversteps and excesses (I do think Park ran a little amok with the computer gimcrackery), Oldboy has the bulldozing nerve and full-blooded passion of a classic.

As always with Park Chanwook, you just hold on and let him rip.

Once the picture gets into Hollywood's bloodstream, it could well prove to be as influential as John Woo's 1989 crime thriller, "The Killer."

A wild, intensely cinematic ride into two men's burning desire to get even.

The result is a powerfully visceral experience that justifies itself almost entirely on surface chops, with striking color composition and a complex sound design that elevates the story to an operatic scale.

Regardless of how you look at Oldboy, it's unlike anything you are likely to have seen before.

Oldboy has the fatal air of wanting so desperately to be a cult movie that it forgets to present itself as a coherent one.

Oldboy caused a love-it-or-hate-it stir at Cannes last year, and how could it not: It's an onslaught made to cause a sensation. Consider me simultaneously jolted and depressed.

Put simply, in my humble opinion, Oldboy sucks.