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Swiri
Metascore
50 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 18 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 6 out of 18
  2. Mixed: 11 out of 18
  3. Negative: 1 out of 18
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  1. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kevin Thomas
    90
    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.
  2. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Keith Phipps
    80
    An oddly effective mixture of technical prowess, well-executed cliché, and unexpected political poignancy.
  3. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Wilmington
    75
    A beautifully tooled action thriller about love and terrorism.
  4. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Steven Rea
    75
    Compelling, kinetic, fast and furious.
  5. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: Sean Axmaker
    75
    This is an unmistakably Asian variant on the action movie, a sleek, slick, entertaining espionage thriller in the John Woo mold.
  6. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Jonathan Foreman
    63
    The girl you see stabbing and shooting prisoners and fellow trainees makes the killer from "La Femme Nikita" look like a wuss.
  7. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Dana Stevens
    60
    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.
  8. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Elizabeth Weitzman
    50
    Americans, for better or worse, have already seen plenty of budget-busting action flicks with half-baked political pretensions.
  9. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Carla Meyer
    50
    Suffers most from being overlong.
  10. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    50
    The all-too-vivid simulation of terrorist attacks, including a prolonged scene of a building collapse in which people are seen plummeting to their deaths and crushed under falling concrete, may strike a very different chord with post-9/11 American audiences.
  11. Wall Street Journal
    Reviewed by: Joe Morgenstern
    50
    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.
    All this critic's reviews
  12. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Michael O'Sullivan
    50
    The film actually gets to tackle some larger questions than one normally finds in the average fireball drama.
    All this critic's reviews
  13. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Paul Malcolm
    40
    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.
  14. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: J. Hoberman
    40
    High-powered and gory.
  15. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Stephen Hunter
    40
    Suffers from all the excesses of the genre: gunfights that go on and on and on, a plot that is almost incomprehensible.
  16. New Times (L.A.)
    Reviewed by: Andy Klein
    40
    Thankfully, the final, long action set piece, which owes a debt to "The Manchurian Candidate" among others, is free of such problems. Shiri manages to go out on its most exciting sequence. There are worse ways to go.
  17. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Ted Shen
    40
    Shamelessly derivative and politically expedient.
  18. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Phil Hall
    20
    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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