Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
Director
Kang Je-gyu
Cast
Han Suk-kyu,
Choi Min-sik,
Yunjin Kim,
Song Kang-ho,
Park Yong-woo,
Kim Su-ro
Genre
Action,
Adventure,
Drama,
Thriller
When North Korean Special Forces hijack a shipment of explosives and threaten South Korea as part of a plot to re-unify the two countries, South Korean Special Agents Ryu and Lee must track down and stop the terrorists. Meanwhile Hee, the top North Korean female sniper, resurfaces to wreak havoc and haunt Ryu.
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
In recent years, South Korean cinema has fully flowered, producing both uncompromising highly personal films and crisp, intelligent genre movies, with Shiri the most spectacular example of the latter to date.
The A.V. Club by Keith Phipps
An oddly effective mixture of technical prowess, well-executed cliché, and unexpected political poignancy.
Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington
A beautifully tooled action thriller about love and terrorism.
Philadelphia Inquirer by Steven Rea
Compelling, kinetic, fast and furious.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Sean Axmaker
This is an unmistakably Asian variant on the action movie, a sleek, slick, entertaining espionage thriller in the John Woo mold.
New York Post by Jonathan Foreman
The girl you see stabbing and shooting prisoners and fellow trainees makes the killer from "La Femme Nikita" look like a wuss.
The New York Times by Dana Stevens
Mr. Kang is a gifted choreographer of bloody chaos, but he has enough range and imagination to strew a few interludes of haunting tenderness amid the shell casings and ketchup packs.
San Francisco Chronicle
Suffers most from being overlong.
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
Americans, for better or worse, have already seen plenty of budget-busting action flicks with half-baked political pretensions.
Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern
The action looks impressive, even when nothing much is happening beyond local explosions or shattering glass, and the drama turns, affectingly, on a mysterious female sniper with a partitioned soul.
San Francisco Chronicle by Carla Meyer
Suffers most from being overlong.
Chicago Reader by Ted Shen
Shamelessly derivative and politically expedient.
L.A. Weekly by Paul Malcolm
Though the two-hour film can go slack with excess explication, Shiri compensates with an overheated drive that forces the myopia of current events toward a broader field of vision.
Film Threat by Phil Hall
A thoroughly awful Korean production which vainly attempts to recast the slam-bang conventions of American action-adventure flicks into the sticky world of contemporary Korean politics.
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