Admittedly there is still a lot of apprehension about Spike Lee’s upcoming remake of Oldboy
which will be released through FilmDistrict on
Nov. 27.

There’s plenty riding on the film, especially Spike’s reputation.
Will this be a return to form for him? He sure didn’t make it easy for himself, and you have to admit he loves a challenge, taking on a remake of Chan-wook Park’s absolutely fantastic, mind
bending original film. Can Spike pull it off? I’m crossing my fingers for him.

So I have to confess that it’s a little worrying, when, in a recent
L.A. Times interview, Oldboy star Josh
Brolin, shared that he’s not exactly “enamored” with the final cut of the film.

Here’s the key piece from the interview:

“I do have opinions, but it’s better to bite my tongue,” [Brolin] said when asked what he thought of the finished film. (The actor says he was more enamored with Lee’s earlier three-hour director’s cut that was both quieter and filled with more character-centric moments.)

Sounds as if the film we are going to see in theaters (not the 3-hour cut Brolin prefers) was edited to emphasize the action and extreme violence, and focus less on the character study nuances, which the original film has a lot of.

And considering that, according to Imdb.com, the film’s current
running time is 104 minutes. The fact
that the original cut was three hours obviously means that quite a bit was cut out of the
film.

Of course there’s no way that FilmDistrict was going to release
a three hour movie, though there’s always the possibly that Spike’s original, longer version could eventually make its way
on DVD. But one hopes that the radical cuts don’t hurt the film in any major way.

We’ll have to wait and see.