Yunjin Kim (Sun from TV's Lost) stars as tropical fish seller Myung-hyun Lee, who, unbeknownst to her counter-terrorist fiancé Jong Won Yu (Suk-kyu Han), is actually undercover assassin Hee, member of a special forces group that has hijacked some high-tech explosives as part of a desperate plot to re-unify North and South Korea.
The quote on the front of my DVD claims that Shiri is 'a mix of Nikita and Die Hard', which, to be blunt, is a crock of s**t. Apart from one of the main characters being a female killer and an awful lot of gunfire, this Korean flick bears very little resemblance to and is nowhere near as good as either of the aforementioned films. What we actually get with Shiri is a fairly mundane bad guys versus good guys thriller in which lots of people get killed (although who is shooting at who and why is often hard to keep track of), with an overload of shaky camera-work and some nonsense about tropical fish thrown in for those icthyophile action fans in the audience.
Funniest part: when a cornered female terrorist kills herself by swallowing a small explosive that blows her head apart. Most ridiculous moment: an agent discovering a bugging device hidden inside one of the tropical fish in his office (not only are we expected to believe that successfully performing such an operation on a fish would be feasible, but we are also supposed to accept that such a device would pick up sound from inside the creature submersed in a full tank of water).
The quote on the front of my DVD claims that Shiri is 'a mix of Nikita and Die Hard', which, to be blunt, is a crock of s**t. Apart from one of the main characters being a female killer and an awful lot of gunfire, this Korean flick bears very little resemblance to and is nowhere near as good as either of the aforementioned films. What we actually get with Shiri is a fairly mundane bad guys versus good guys thriller in which lots of people get killed (although who is shooting at who and why is often hard to keep track of), with an overload of shaky camera-work and some nonsense about tropical fish thrown in for those icthyophile action fans in the audience.
Funniest part: when a cornered female terrorist kills herself by swallowing a small explosive that blows her head apart. Most ridiculous moment: an agent discovering a bugging device hidden inside one of the tropical fish in his office (not only are we expected to believe that successfully performing such an operation on a fish would be feasible, but we are also supposed to accept that such a device would pick up sound from inside the creature submersed in a full tank of water).