Shiri (1999)

Original title: 쉬리

Yu Jong-won (Han Seok-Kyu) and his partner and best friend Park Mu-young (Choi Min-sik when he was rather sleek and well groomed) are working for the South Korean security services, fighting the dastardly plans of Northern spies, mostly successfully. Some years ago, though, a female assassin named Lee Bang-hee managed to paint quite the trail of blood through various officials, ending her series of murders once things got to hot with a goodbye note written on the corpse of spy colleague of Jong-won and Mu-young. Needless to say, this thing still smarts, particularly the more melodramatically inclined Jong-won.

Now, just when Jong-won is planning the wedding date with his fiancée Lee Mying-hyun (Kim Yoon-jin), Bang-hee is becoming active again. Her murders have apparently something to do with the North’s attempts to acquire a basically magical new liquid explosive, though that will turn out to only be the first step in a much bigger and deadlier project.

Formally and stylistically, Kang Je-gyu’s brilliant South Korean action film Shiri is a big sloppy kiss for Hong Kong’s Heroic Bloodshed genre, so it’ll come as no surprise that the film is as much interested in portraying the melodramatically elevated emotional states of its characters through its action as it is in showing fun explosions. For the first forty minutes or so, the film’s attempts in this direction don’t feel to work out quite well enough. The action is certainly kinetic and fast, but its emotional underpinnings don’t quite seem to hit the mark. However, this curious feeling of tepidness isn’t the film failing to hold up to its role models as one might expect, but director Kang Je-gyu playing a longer game, slowly (for the genre, this is still a fast mover in anyone’s book) and expertly revealing greater dramatic and emotional complexity so that it can hit the audience all the better over the head with it. And before a viewer can think “hey, that’s a rather cleverly thought up and well realized way to use these old tropes”, suddenly, personal and emotional stakes have become as big as the action – which is pretty damn big.

Kang doesn’t stop there, though: there’s also the way main protagonist and antagonist are paralleling one another, both also consciously mirroring the separation between the North and South of Korea; and how an at first pretty jingoistic seeming action movie turns into a film that very consciously uses the spectacular shoot-outs and the tears (oh, the tears!) to also talk about the psychological toll the state of affairs between the two Koreas has on the people trying to live their lives there. The film shows a heart-on-its-sleeve sort of pain about the relationship between the Koreas, hiding things South Korean cinema usually tries to avoid even looking at under cover of its awesome spectacle. In other words, unlike a lot of films inspired by the Heroic Bloodshed genre, Shiri doesn’t just take the genre’s cool surface elements (though there’s nothing wrong with that, of course) but actually looks closely at its techniques to then apply them to themes and ideas close to the heart of its director.


This slowly developing depth and complexity is of course only half of the reason why Shiri is quite as wonderful an example of action cinema as it is. There’s also the action itself: it’s kinetic, fast, and varied, but also keeps in mind the importance of some standards of its genre. Glass needs to be broken, cars explode, partners need to die heroically, and happy ends aren’t really in the cards in a world where nobody can survive while being only one person instead of fragmented parts (again mirroring the Koreas).