The Movie: I am reviewing the Asian release version of this DVD. The American release is due out in April 2002.

I first found out about Shiri while reading about the San Diego Asian Film Festival. Shiri was one of the films they were showing and they noted that it was the top grossing film of all time in the Korean market, recently beating out Titanic. Hmmm, to beat Titanic at the box office, I figured it must be pretty good! Well, I didn't make it out the Asian Film Festival, but what I did do was head over to HKFLIX.COM, seller of Asian DVDs and VCDs, and whaddya know, they had a special edition, two-disc set for this very film in stock. So I ordered it.

To tell you the truth, top-grossing film or not, I wasn't expecting a whole lot. I mean, from what I've seen of Korean movies and television shows, the term "high production value" isn't exactly the first thing that comes to mind...

Well, by American standards, I'd say this movie was just alright. It's basically your standard action/suspense movie formula that you've seen a million times before in American movies of the 80's, except instead of the cold war, you have the unification of North and South Korea running as a backdrop.

You've got your terrorist-type enemy, who is trying further their agenda with a plot to take out the leaders of a country, a top-secret, high tech experimental weapon stolen, and your two good guy partners trying to find the spy that's on the inside. It even comes with the generic ticking-bomb climax at the end. It really is a generic action movie, to the bitter end. On the other hand, especially considering its small-by-american-standards budget, it does pull of a real high production value look, and was more than I expected of the Korean film industry.

The DVD: As soon as I opened the package, from the get-go this movie was already impressing me. The packaging of this DVD is on par with the best of what I've seen from American companies putting out multi-disc sets. The box looks great, printed with metallic inks, and other quality features of packaging that you don't normally see in your run of the mill DVD boxes. Popping the first disc in, it became clear that this was truly a first-class operation -- they really went all out on the animated, interactive menus, putting together a real slick interface.

The film transfer of the movie looks pretty good, although there are a couple of spots where you can see some specs and hairs on the film, but overall it's a good looking, anamorphically encoded 16:9 widescreen transfer. Did I mention this thing has DTS sound? It's the real deal!

The second disc is full of special features, including some documentaries, trailers, behind the scenes stuff, and a nifty little index on all the guns they used in the movie, with fact sheets. Unfortunately, most of these special features are in Korean, so if you don't understand Korean, they will be of little use to you. The main movie does include, however, subtitles in English.

In the documentary-type footage, you see a lot of people from the public expressing great pride, that yes, even a Korean movie company can pull off a decent movie. Also included in the trailers section are two spots used for the Japanese market (for which the movie was subtly renamed to "Shuri"). Another interesting tidbit in the special features is the inclusion of four "Dolby Digital" intros, and also a DTS one -- the kinds you see attached to the beginnings of movies at the theater when it is being presented with one of these technologies. They are pretty fun to play with in your home theater system, that's for sure!

So the overall verdict on Shiri is that the movie is... OK. If you have some way of seeing this movie without too much trouble, you might as well check it out, but I wouldn't go out of my way to see it. And the quality of the DVD is pretty high up there... the level of production certainly impressed me!