If you haven’t seen Chan Wook-Park’s Old Boy, you need to rent it right away because it’s pretty legit.  Unless you can’t read subtitles, in which case it’d probably just be depressing.  Anyway, as you may have guessed from the headline, Spielberg is trying to get the rights and wants to do a remake for Universal starring Will Smith.

In the 2003 Korean original, a man gets kidnapped and held in a shabby cell for 15 years without explanation. Suddenly, he’s released and given money, a cell phone and clothes and is set on a path to discover who destroyed his life so he can take revenge. [Variety]

Spielberg isn’t nearly as shitty a filmmaker as George Lucas, and I’m even willing to concede he’s made some pretty good movies (Jurassic Park, Minority Report, Saving Private Ryan…), but one thing the dude most certainly does not have a talent for is dark and edgy.  And if he remakes Old Boy, with Will “I only play good guys” Smith of all people, it’s going to be the most dickless watered-down hero story ever.  If you want to know what Spielberg does with edgy material, just watch the last 30 minutes of AI.  It’s a good thing that kid from Virginia Tech already killed a bunch of people, because this probably would’ve put him over the edge.  Okay, so on second thought, I guess that’s probably not a good thing, but I think we all know what I meant.  Shut up, you were thinking it too.