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

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

Five average Koreans develop superpowers following organ transplants in writer/director Kang Hyoung-chul’s Hi-Five, a wilfully kooky superhero origin story with little on its mind beyond a good time. Cleaving closely to the superhero team-up formula – onset of powers, discovery of a threat, internal strife, commitment to continued super-teamwork and a group name – Kang (Sunny, Swing Kids) leans into the sub-genre’s fantastical elements by letting its artifice show. The mix of satirical comedy, action and sentimentalism is not always comfortable, and prevents the film from truly breaking the mould. Yet its bubblegum aesthetic, unchallenging narrative and strong cast, which includes Burning and The Match star Yoo Ah-in, make it ideal summer fare.

 Little on its mind beyond a good time

Having been delayed from its original 2023 release following Yoo’s conviction for drugs offences, Hi-Five has been rolling out across various regions including Hong Kong, Taiwan and the US after launching in South Korea on May 30. There, enthusiastic audiences propelled the film to a better per-screen average than Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning in its first few days, and it has now taken more than $10m on home turf. Given the film’s popular cast, its prospects across the rest of the region look just as bright and, further afield, it could find traction in the circles that made Lee Byeong-heon’s Extreme Job (2019) a niche hit.

Hi-Five opens with an unidentified surgical patient having their organs harvested, only for the body to disintegrate on the table as soon as the doctors are finished. The heart is subsequently donated to sheltered teenager Wan-seo (Lee Jae-in), corneas go to self-involved layabout Ki-dong (Yoo), lungs to failing author Ji-sung (Ahn Jae-hong, most recently seen in Netflix’s absurdist Chicken Nugget), liver to construction foreman Yak-sun (Kim Hee-won), and kidneys to yoghurt cart ajumma Sun-nyeo (Ra Mi-ran from 2019’s Miss & Mrs. Cops).

Each soon realises they have developed superpowers – speed and strength, power over electromagnetism, over wind, healing and as a conduit, respectively. They reluctantly come together, calling themselves the ’Hi-Five, when the venal pastor of a mega church/cult, Seo (Shin Gu, with K-pop boyband GOT7’s Park Jin-young as the younger version), steps up his mission to bilk his congregants of their wealth. It just so happens Seo received the donated pancreas, and with it the power to reverse ageing.

Filmmaker Kang broke out in 2011 with the crushingly nostalgic and emotional Sunny, about a sextet of women reuniting to mourn the loss of a friend, and the same kind of emotional undercurrents prop up Hi-Five. Ji-sung is not just a struggling writer, he is dealing with plagiarism accusations. Wan-seo’s pre-transplant heart condition has made her taekwondo coach father (veteran Oh Jung-se, Cobweb) protective to the point of suffocation and loneliness. Sun-nyeo is wracked with guilt over a house fire she started. This being a Korean film, there is also a dig at corporate malfeasance in Yak-sun’s attempts to get his bosses to install basic site safety measures.

None of these motivations are rendered is a particularly vivid way, despite the game cast’s efforts to humanise their underwritten characters. Yoo in particular is poorly served, simply labelled unemployed and vaguely bratty. That leaves gaps in the narrative, such as why Ji-sung and Ki-dong are initially hostile towards one another. Kang does, however, give Ki-dong the film’s best needle drop in Corey Hart’s ’80s deep cut ‘Sunglasses at Night’, to go along with the film’s most delightfully unhinged action sequence: a chase around a typically hilly Seoul neighbourhood between a gangster’s limo and Sun-nyeo’s rickety yoghurt cart, powered by Wan-seo and set to Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.

The final protracted boss fight sees the Hi-Five square off against the young Seo, and teems with the requisite volume of rubble, shattered glass and gravity-defying fisticuffs. Hi-Five is an origin story so a sequel is indeed teased – and, if it continues to perform as it has, that could very well be a safe bet.