The one and only Spike Lee movie that isn’t a Spike Lee joint: “Tough motherfucking business”
Since the early 1980s, ‘A Spike Lee Joint’ has become one of the most recognisable prefixes in cinema, and a calling card for one of the modern era’s most incendiary, influential, and vital filmmaking voices.
It’s a simple four-word mantra, but incredibly evocative nonetheless. It instantly lets the viewers know that what they’re about to see isn’t a studio-mandated, boardroom-devised, and executive-approved picture designed to appeal to the widest possible audience, but the uncompromising work of an auteur.
Like anybody who’s been in the business for over 40 years, not every Spike Lee joint is a great movie, but the one thing they all have in common is that they’re the unfiltered, unfettered results of his creative vision and artistic integrity. Apart from that one time it wasn’t, which is why it wasn’t a joint at all, but a mere film.
He may have made worse movies, which depends entirely on how you feel about some of his so-called lesser works, like She Hate Me, Miracle at St Anna, or Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, but Lee has never made anything that’s felt less like a Spike Lee joint and more of a pointless exercise than his Oldboy remake, which is why it’s the only one of his 25 features that doesn’t have the bespoke designation.
Park Chan-wook’s 2003 masterpiece didn’t need a remake, but it got one anyway, and on paper, Lee was about as solid a choice as you’d be able to find. However, it placed him at the mercy of a major studio, and as much as Inside Man was a commercial vehicle, being a Denzel Washington-led crime thriller, Oldboy V2.0 didn’t afford the director anywhere near the same amount of leeway.
Lee had a three-hour cut in mind, only for the do-over to limp into cinemas at a brisk 104 minutes. Even with a big-name filmmaker at the helm, there’s only so much you can do with a movie that nobody was asking for, especially one that was tarnished by the reliably grubby fingerprints of behind-the-scenes interference.
Needless to say, Oldboy was a box office disaster and a critical pariah, and while he did his best to hold his tongue, the Academy Award winner said all that he needed to say in three words when asked why the studio fiddled with his recreation of the iconic hallway scene: “Tough motherfucking business.”
Leading man Josh Brolin was more forthcoming, though. “I thought Spike’s cut was actually way better than the studio’s, but the studio took it away, and I thought they’d cut it very poorly, and I thought it ended up having the opposite effect,” he explained. “That’s what happens when you start cutting to this idea of pandering for an audience, and how testing can bite you in the ass.”
Lee was more diplomatic, at least in a public setting, but along the exact same lines as his three-word appraisal of the post-production process, Oldboy said everything it needed to when it became his first flick to be titled as ‘A Spike Lee Film’, not ‘A Spike Lee Joint’.
