Shiri

1999 Action/Adventure

Billed as Full Metal Jacket meets Heat meets Nikita, Kang Je Gyu directs this wildly popular action-thriller about tensions between North and South Korea. The film opens with agents in North Korean spy school T19 engaged in an unbelievably difficult rigorous training regime. The school's fanatically committed leader, Park Mu Young (Choi Min Sik) singles out the beautiful and sinewy Lee Bang Hee (Kim Yun Jin), an ace student and a deadeye shot, for a top-secret mission. A couple of years later, South Korean intelligence agents are baffled by a spate of murders of scientists working on a top-secret defense project. Agents Yu Jong Won (Han Suk Kyu) and Lee Jang Gil (Song Kang Ho) suspect the North Korean Lee but cannot locate her. One day, Yu finally spots Lee Bang Hee icing an arms dealer with a sniper rifle. At the same time, North Korean spy Park Mu Young and his fellow commandos take out a military convoy and swipe a top-secret substance called CTX, an explosive that is completely undetectable. Park and Lee's plan slowly becomes horribly apparent: to blow up a North and South Korean friendship soccer game, launching a war that will bring South Korea under the North's hegemony. At the same time, South Korean intelligence is starting to suspect a mole in their midst and evidence seems to point to Yu's girlfriend. This film was screened at the 1999 Pusan Film Festival. more..

Director: Je-gyu Kang

Starring: Han Suk-kyu, Min-Sik Choi, Yoon-jin Kim, Kang-ho Song, Derek Kim

Reviews

  • In recent years, South Korean cinema has fully flowered, producing both uncompromising highly personal films and crisp, intelligent genre movies, with Shiri the most spectacular example of the latter to date.

    Kevin Thomas - Los Angeles Times

    19 January 2013

  • A beautifully tooled action thriller about love and terrorism.

    Michael Wilmington - The Chicago Tribune

    19 January 2013

  • The girl you see stabbing and shooting prisoners and fellow trainees makes the killer from "La Femme Nikita" look like a wuss.

    Jonathan Foreman - New York Post

    19 January 2013

  • Mr. Kang is a gifted choreographer of bloody chaos, but he has enough range and imagination to strew a few interludes of haunting tenderness amid the shell casings and ketchup packs.

    Dana Stevens - The New York Times

    19 January 2013

  • The film actually gets to tackle some larger questions than one normally finds in the average fireball drama.

    Michael O'Sullivan - The Washington Post

    19 January 2013

Awards

  • Gok-ji Park

    Asia-Pacific Film Festival (1999)

  • Best Foreign Film

    Awards of the Japanese Academy (2001)

     
  • Best New Actress

    Grand Bell Awards, South Korea (1999)