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Two cops. A female assassin. A divided country. A ticking time bomb. Korean director Kang Je-Gyu's film certainly has all the right ingredients for an explosive action movie, as Ryu (Han Suk-Gyu) and Lee (Song Kang-Ho) race against the clock to save Seoul from disaster after a rogue group of North Koreans try to lead the country into war.
What makes "Shiri" such an unusual thriller, though, is the way in which Kang happily ditches almost every convention of the action movie genre, lifting an undercurrent of homoerotic soul-searching from John Woo's films (Kang is regularly compared to both Woo and Luc Besson in his homeland) and deciding to pay more attention to the relationship between Ryu and his fianc茅, Hyun (Kim Yun-Jin), than the threadbare action set-pieces.
Taking place in a hyper-real, Day-glo-coloured world of brightly lit noodle bars, shopping malls, and Seoul back streets, the exaggerated script is played absolutely straight by everyone involved. Which is quite an achievement, since the plot involves a schizophrenic hitwoman caught between two men, two countries, and two identities and with a vested interest in Ryu that's so obvious it might as well have been stated at the start of the film.
She's supposed to represent Korea's divided self - but all she really proves is that Kang doesn't know the difference between subtlety and stupidity.
Running a good 40 minutes longer than it ought to, "Shiri" quickly squanders all the points it racked up for its leftfield approach, leaving us with the kind of action flick where lots of bullets get fired, but not many actually hit their target.
Which is probably a perfect metaphor for the whole adventure.
In Korean with English subtitles.
