Oldboy, review - Telegraph Dir: Spike Lee. Starring: Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Olsen, Sharlto Copley, Michael Imperioli. 18 cert, 104 min The words "Hollywood remake," with or without the words "inevitable" or "slick" before them, are capable of producing reflex groans in a large faction of film fans. Let's not be snooty. It's possible to hold out hope for each individual project - the occasional Insomnia (2002) does happen, after all. But then a remake as criminal as Spike Lee's Oldboy comes along, making the groaners harder to argue with. The 2003 Korean film of the same name was an almost sadistically brilliant exercise in audience manipulation. A good American adaptation of it - ideally with different twists up its sleeve, to preserve some element of surprise - might have been feasible. Alas, Lee has wrought the opposite - a garish reproduction that never pretends to know who it's for. To be fair, the movie doesn't reveal its full terribleness until roughly midway. Sean Bobbitt's bravura camerawork keeps the first part hot with flashy potential, and Josh Brolin starts out fine, as a brutish, divorced advertising executive called Joe Doucett, who finds himself inexplicably imprisoned after a boozy night in the early 1990s. If you're wondering about Spike Lee touches, there's one on the wall of Joe's prison, which looks like a boutique hotel room, and comes adorned with the grinning, obviously racist portrait of a black bellboy and the words, "What can we do to improve your stay?" Well, Joe's never allowed to answer that question, and his stay lasts 20 years. Once released, he's hell-bent on revenge, and the film hell-bent on getting sillier and sillier. Lee doesn't ask Brolin to consume a live octopus, as his predecessor Choi Min-sik had to, but forces him into much worse, including a lot of running around with a camera strapped to his front, while making simian grunting noises. We get that Joe is damaged, but Brolin's performance becomes impossible to take seriously. The same is true of Samuel L Jackson, who cameos as a backstage prison Svengali with a yellow mohawk. And let's not get started on Sharlto Copley, playing the villain of the piece as an instantly laughable camp Brit with a prissy way of pecking at his iPhone - he's like Kenny Everett crossed with Dr Evil. Other than sniggering about what an outré stereotype they've served up, it's hard to see how Lee and Copley can justify this performance, which is quite the worst of the year, and sends the whole final act of their movie straight to oblivion. Poor Elizabeth Olsen, as the young social worker fatefully entwined with Joe, is dangled then dropped, a thoughtless plot device. Lee recreates entire set pieces from Park Chan-wook's film - a corridor rampage with a hammer sees dozens of Jackson's minions unconvincingly clunked - but laces his version with a peculiar contempt for itself. It's as if he realised what a mess he'd got himself into, and took to giggling so we might suspect it was a joke all along.