Positively awful


I'm becoming a big fan of the Korean New Wave and thought this movie would be along the same lines as a Park Chan-wook story, but it cheapens the North/South Korean conflict to nothing more than an Eastern take on a stereotypical Hollywood-style action/thriller with an uninteresting romance element. The music is laughably bad and belongs in a Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster or a Tom Clancy movie. When they started involving the interception of "liquid bomb" technology by a mysterious organization I decided it was time to shut it off. How can anyone find this movie as anything special or unique?





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Modern Plumbing Studios, est. 2004

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[deleted]

i guess it's special because it's the first of the high-budget kind in korea?

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That doesn't mean it has to look like something off of the USA channel. JSA is one of my favorite movies and it was a big budget Korean film. This is like someone's insane inside joke.





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Modern Plumbing Studios, est. 2004

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Shiri was awful, I definitely agree. This movie's important not because it's a good movie (dear christ the romance was so awkwardly weaven into the storyline! :-() but because this was the first movie that made HUGE profit in South Korea. Businesspeople realized that, after this movie, as long as they back the right people, they can make $hitload of money. This movie is crap (except any scenes with Choi Min-Sik in it... he's like the best actor ever), but if it wasn't for this movie, Korean film industry would not have produced JSA, Oldboy, My Sassy Girl, A Tale of Two Sisters, Taegukgi, etc, etc.

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I agree with everything you said except the film was awful.

What was awful and ruins the movie is how "god like" the North Koreans are. Like WTF? 5 of them can't get owned by 20+ South Korean special forces/SWAT? The scenes where they are shooting like 100+ bullets and no one on the North Korean side is getting hit is just too far, even for a Korean movie where they stretch the viewers imagination.

What I really love about this film though is the acting power that is in it. It is really great to see some of these actors do an excellent job.

How many people even knew Kim Yunjin in 1999? When I first saw it I didn't think much of her. I think I didn't even know that she was the girl on Cheju-do either, that is how different her look was. After watching it recently, I was like WOW, how could I have missed that back in the day? It is because I wasn't really paying attention to her. Now after the mass appeal of LOST, she is a household name. Her acting in Shiri is pretty damn good.

I remember when this movie broke all the previous Korean box office records. It was like the Titanic of Korean movies. It is sad though, because I was recently in South Korea and I couldn't find any rental shops that had the DVD of Shiri. First thing I did when returning home was load up my SE DVD set that I bought back in 2000 :)

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I have to agree...this movie sucks. But it did make money and was a watershed film in Korean cinema. The quality of Korean films has greatly improved in recent years now that there is more money being invested in them.

Unfortunately, there won't be a huge international Korean film until they do away with the melodrama that Koreans love so much in their films. For international audiences, that type of melodrama phased out back in the late 1950's. Even Korean comedies have melodrama in them. When the Korean directors figure out they can make millions more by eliminating this annoying aspect of Korean films, perhaps we'll see a true international blockbuster from Korea.

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[deleted]

When I first saw this movie somewhere around 2000, I was very impressed by its fast and intense action scenes, which were nicely complemented by some romance and politics. Now I watched it again and wasn't so impressed anymore. The action scenes didn't look very special anymore. That could be explained by the fact that I have grown accustomed to such action in later movies, Swiri could have been ahead of its time in terms of action and shootouts. But in fact, the shootout scenes in Heat (1995), a few years earlier, were equally intense. So, I don't really think that Swiri was very revolutionary in that regard. And as for the romance and politics - that just seemed cliched this time around. Swiri is reasonably entertaining but nothing special.

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