SHIRI
Reviewed by Harvey Karten No distributor yet Director: Kang Jegyu Writer: Kang Jegyu Cast: Han Suckyu, Choi Minsik, Kim Yunjin, Song Kangho
The major particular to recognize about "Shiri," a Korean production which received its North American premiere at the 22nd annual Asian-American International Film Festival--is not the quality of the movie itself. By Hollywood standards, the production values are just satisfactory, the story about as original as a Jean-Claude Van Damme video game, the romance tepid and hardly credible. Rather, what's striking is that this movie has toppled all box office records in its home country, overturning even "Titanic" to bring in an astonishing return from the people of that divided Asian nation. How to explain the phenomenon? No doubt the adrenaline-charged action, which keeps conversations to a minimum, didn't hurt. Nor did the presence of Han Suckyu, Korea's number one star, the country's Tom Cruise. Like Americans, people throughout most of the world probably put action pictures at the top of their lists, and given the preoccupation of "Shiri" with Korea's leading political dilemma, the division of the country into two independent sovereignties, "Shiri" was bound to become a big hit.
Yet the picture has not yet found an American distributor, despite the good quality of the English subtitles--the reasons perhaps being that none of the performers has any recognition at all except within this country's small Korean- American communities, and dozens of domestic action pictures will keep the public busy the year 'round. Were it not for the annual Asian-American International Film Festival, which highlights films featuring Asians and Asian-Americans, chances are that no one in the U.S. would have had the opportunity to see this mundane picture.
Its chief flaw, one which impairs our enjoyment of at least the first half of this nearly two-hour production, is not even the credibility factor. With action-adventure movies we're perfectly willing to suspend disbelief. But we must be made privy to at least a whisper of what's going on. "Shiri" begins like a video game, the sort that has zero character development. While video games require none--they demand only that you rack up points by shooting down terrorists and the like--a film needs to give the audience at least a clue or two from the very beginning. "Shiri," however, begins with a Hong Kong style shoot-'em-up involving sinister people carrying considerable firepower, virtual killing machines that destroy everything that moves without seeming rhyme or reason. In this case, a film review would not be giving away information better left concealed by informing readers of the central plot point. "Shiri"--apparently transliterated from a fish known as a swiri (whose meaning becomes clear midway)-- involves the struggle of a North Korean unit without the authorization of its own government to provoke a war with the South, a combat which the bad guys hope will result in the unification of the two Koreas after fifty years of division. The unit is led by a fanatic name Park (Choi Minsk), a man who escaped from a plane during a foiled hijack attempt and who has vowed to override the "corruption" of the politicians on both sides. Like some Palestinian extremist groups today, he has little faith that even his own side will bring about the reunification that dominates his dreams.
Park conspires with his band of fellow fanatics to seize a brand new weapon developed by the South, the CPX, a liquid bomb indistinguishable from plain water. The weapon, when triggered by a combination of fuse and powerful lights shone on it, can vaporize everything within at least a kilometer of its center. Park hopes to provoke a final conflict in Korea by the strategic placement and detonation of up to ten of these bombs. Intelligence agents led by Ryu (Hans Suckyu) seek to destroy the villain and recover the hijacked bombs, but to do this Ryu must learn the identity of a leak within the agency. Since he, like every other agent, trusts nobody, not even his partner, he is at a loss to understand how secret information has become the property of the terrorists.
When director Kang Jegyu is not contemplating nuclear war or something as trivial as mass murder by grotesque machine guns, he focuses his camera on a luke-warm romance between Ryu and his current squeeze and fiance, Hyun (Kim Yunjin). So tepid is this liaison that when the two are in bed confessing their passion, Kim is fully dressed while her man lies coyly protected by sheets up to his neck.
At the very least, the film will educate its audience to the political thinking that has dominated Korea for the past fifty years. In 1910 Japan annexed the country, calling it Chosun. After World War 2, two major allied powers occupied the former Japanese protectorate, and at Potsdam the Soviet Union and the United States divided Korea at the 38th parallel, with the Soviets installing a Communist system in the North while frustrating the desires of the Korean people to reunify. In the film, the satanic Park correctly points out that while South Korea--which had been administered by the U.S. for several years after Potsdam--is enjoying hamburger and cokes, the children of the North are starving. "The world is unfair," he whines, implying that the poverty in the North is somehow the fault of its neighbors to the South. But political points aside, "Shiri" is strictly a run-of-the-mill, formulaic operation.
Not Rated. Running Time: 115 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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