Old Boys

Peter McGinn

Old Boys was mostly entertaining for me. The humor in the realistic dialogue, and the charm of the "moving" pictures the lead character supposedly drew were a fun element of the otherwise cliched script. I swear if another movie about a British residential school for boys includes a scene of the dork kid being lowered upside down into a toilet or trash can, I will stop watching it. It is so common in these types of movies that it has become boring. How refreshing it would be to show the "bullies" having brains and doing something completely different, like sarcastically treating new or dorky kids as royalty, bowing to them and praising them, which the kids knowing it was fake and wondering where it might lead. I had a slight problem with the fact that a few of the characters were French, and sometimes they had conversations that weren't translated. I assume that either the version I viewed lacked the translation accidentally, or else those conversations weren't critical to the story. I also wasn't thrilled with the ending, which I won't reveal here. I guess they must have wanted to avoid what seemed to be the two obvious endings and went with a third choice instead. It is not a movie I will want to watch again, but it was fine for a single viewing.