A team of crouching police, weapons drawn, herds a wounded woman into a back alley. As they circle around her, guns aimed at her temples, her look changes from panic to a calm intensity. She spends a moment silently facing her captors and then makes her move. “For the unification!” she says while snatching an ampoule off her necklace and swallowing it whole. The police pause for a moment, not sure what to do. Then her head explodes.
Thus, we have Korean reunification politics, at least as far as one new South Korean film is concerned. Incredibly popular in its domestic market, Shiri is a gory, bullet-ridden action flick revolving like a passing meteor around contemporary events. A properly answered SAT question might read, “Shiri : Korea :: Patriot Games : Ireland.”
There are differences?Shiri happens to possess traits which make a movie a mild “psychological thriller.” Not to say it has anything to do with psychology, but our characters do actually find themselves confronted with decisions, which they eventually make. And, Shiri doesn’t include a gatling gun-toting Jesse Ventura, or any other Americans for that matter.
The North Koreans are, naturally, the baddies. The enervating violence of the opening sequence quickly makes this distinction, as North Korean troops training for Special Forces practice on live targets, sometimes even each other. One scene finds a man and a woman standing at opposite ends of a table, each in front of a disassembled pistol. They race to put the guns together, and when the woman finishes first, she promptly shoots the loser.
For a moment in this five-minute training sequence, Shiri seems to tip towards tenderness in these brutal portrayals of North Korea. The movie almost convinces the unsuspecting viewer that it will be some kind of commentary. But the swift introduction of our smooth-dressing South Korean FBI-equivalent heroes soon kicks those ideas to the back burner. They proceed to chide each other and clash with their boss ? la every cop movie ever made.
These heroes are Ryu (Han Suk-Gyu) and Lee (Song Kang-Ho). As apparently the “best two agents” in South Korea, they spend their lives dining in fancy restaurants, going to musicals with Lee’s pet fish-selling girlfriend Hyun (Kim Yun-Jin) and venting their frustrations at their collective inability to track a North Korean special forces sniper who keeps killing characters before we can even figure out who they are.
But, while the story may take a while to click, the audience is handed the blatant imagery of the kissinguri fish, native to Korea. The fish can live only in pairs. If one dies, the other follows suit from loneliness. Which, of course, explains why the North Korean military has come down to pay Ryu and Lee a visit. It is straightforward metaphors such as these that lead people to say things like, “This movie adds up to more than the sum of its parts.”
From here, the plot progresses predictably enough. The North Korean team, led by a woman named Hee, soon proves to be interested in more than knocking off surly underworld characters, and steals a bomb. The bomb is made of “CTX,” a top-secret material that is indistinguishable from water. A budget-slashing studio device? Maybe. But they ended up spending the money anyhow on lots and lots of explosions.
As the ridiculously drawn-out ending begins, the psycho-thriller element, another of those parts-which-the-movie-equals-more-than, makes a sudden appearance as both North and South are confronted with some loyalty issues. But the question still boils down to whom to shoot at and when, leaving Shiri firmly entrenched on the “action” shelf?but with decent company.
Shiri is playing at Loews Cineplex Dupont Circle, 1350 19th St., N.W.
