‘Hi-Five’ review: ‘Burning’ star Yoo Ah-in joins strong cast for South Korean superhero movie

Dir: Kang Hyoung-chul. South Korea. 2025. 119mins

5 common Koreans develop superpowers following organ transplants in author/director Kang Hyoung-chul’s Hello-5, a wilfully kooky superhero origin story with little on its thoughts past an excellent time. Cleaving carefully to the superhero team-up method – onset of powers, discovery of a menace, inside strife, dedication to continued super-teamwork and a bunch identify – Kang (Sunny, Swing Children) leans into the sub-genre’s fantastical parts by letting its artifice present. The combo of satirical comedy, motion and sentimentalism just isn’t all the time snug, and prevents the movie from actually breaking the mould. But its bubblegum aesthetic, unchallenging narrative and powerful forged, which incorporates Burning and The Match star Yoo Ah-in, make it best summer season fare.

 Little on its thoughts past an excellent time

Having been delayed from its unique 2023 launch following Yoo’s conviction for medication offences, Hello-5 has been rolling out throughout numerous areas together with Hong Kong, Taiwan and the US after launching in South Korea on Could 30. There, enthusiastic audiences propelled the movie to a greater per-screen common than Mission: Unimaginable – The Remaining Reckoning in its first few days, and it has now taken greater than $10m on residence turf. Given the movie’s common forged, its prospects throughout the remainder of the area look simply as shiny and, additional afield, it might discover traction within the circles that made Lee Byeong-heon’s Excessive Job (2019) a distinct segment hit.

Hello-5 opens with an unidentified surgical affected person having their organs harvested, just for the physique to disintegrate on the desk as quickly because the docs are completed. The guts is subsequently donated to sheltered teenager Wan-seo (Lee Jae-in), corneas go to self-involved layabout Ki-dong (Yoo), lungs to failing creator Ji-sung (Ahn Jae-hong, most just lately seen in Netflix’s absurdist Rooster Nugget), liver to building foreman Yak-sun (Kim Hee-won), and kidneys to yoghurt cart ajumma Solar-nyeo (Ra Mi-ran from 2019’s Miss & Mrs. Cops).

Every quickly realises they’ve developed superpowers – velocity and energy, energy over electromagnetism, over wind, therapeutic and as a conduit, respectively. They reluctantly come collectively, calling themselves the ’Hello-5, when the venal pastor of a mega church/cult, Search engine optimisation (Shin Gu, with Okay-pop boyband GOT7’s Park Jin-young because the youthful model), steps up his mission to bilk his congregants of their wealth. It simply so occurs Search engine optimisation acquired the donated pancreas, and with it the ability to reverse ageing.

Filmmaker Kang broke out in 2011 with the crushingly nostalgic and emotional Sunny, a couple of sextet of ladies reuniting to mourn the lack of a buddy, and the identical form of emotional undercurrents prop up Hello-5. Ji-sung isn’t just a struggling author, he’s coping with plagiarism accusations. Wan-seo’s pre-transplant coronary heart situation has made her taekwondo coach father (veteran Oh Jung-se, Cobweb) protecting to the purpose of suffocation and loneliness. Solar-nyeo is wracked with guilt over a home hearth she began. This being a Korean movie, there may be additionally a dig at company malfeasance in Yak-sun’s makes an attempt to get his bosses to put in fundamental web site security measures.

None of those motivations are rendered is a very vivid means, regardless of the sport forged’s efforts to humanise their underwritten characters. Yoo specifically is poorly served, merely labelled unemployed and vaguely bratty. That leaves gaps within the narrative, comparable to why Ji-sung and Ki-dong are initially hostile in the direction of each other. Kang does, nevertheless, give Ki-dong the movie’s finest needle drop in Corey Hart’s ’80s deep reduce ‘Sun shades at Evening’, to go together with the movie’s most delightfully unhinged motion sequence: a chase round a sometimes hilly Seoul neighbourhood between a gangster’s limo and Solar-nyeo’s rickety yoghurt cart, powered by Wan-seo and set to Rick Astley’s ‘By no means Gonna Give You Up’.

The ultimate protracted boss battle sees the Hello-5 sq. off in opposition to the younger Search engine optimisation, and teems with the requisite quantity of rubble, shattered glass and gravity-defying fisticuffs. Hello-5 is an origin story so a sequel is certainly teased – and, if it continues to carry out because it has, that would very effectively be a secure wager.