South Korean film “Hi-Five” have some silly but cheerful fun with its colorful genre elements, and I enjoyed that more than expected. While this is another familiar superhero origin tale, the movie is funny and spirited with a lot of wit and personality to be savored, and you may hope for a possible sequel to follow after watching its finale.

At the beginning, the movie quickly establishes how its several different main characters happen to acquire each own superpower via one certain coincidence among them. Each of them received an organ transplant, and all of their respective transplanted organs came from one unidentified person who seems very special considering what occurred right after the organ donation process.

Anyway, one of these organ receivers is a girl named Wan-seo (Lee Jae-in), who had a serious heart problem before her heart transplant. While her overprotective father Jong-min (Oh Jung-se), who has run a little Taekwondo academy, is still quite concerned about his daughter’s physical condition, Wan-seo wants more fun and freedom besides being eager to play Taekwondo again, and then she is delighted to discover that she somehow becomes quite strong and fast after her surgery.

As she willingly tests more of this unexpected superpower of hers, Wan-seo is approached by a young struggling writer named Ji-sung (Ahn Jae-hong), who also came to have his own superpower after receiving a lung transplant. Thanks to his new lungs, he is now equipped with enormous lung power, and we see how easily he can blow away things with his mere breath. 

Ji-sung and Wan-seo subsequently look for the other people who also acquire each own superpower via that mysterious donor, and they soon come across two such people. Sun-nyeo (Ra Mi-ran) is just a meek yogurt seller, and she still does not know anything about what kind of superpower she acquired via her kidney transplant, though she is clearly marked on her body just like Ji-sung and Wan-seo. In case of a cocky lad named Ki-dong (Yoo Ah-in), he can see and manipulate electromagnetic waves thanks to his recent corneal transplant, and this superpower of his certainly helps him a lot when he tries a bit on those electronic gambling machines.

In the meantime, we are also introduced to the two other remaining cases, Yak-sun (Kim Hee-won) comes to acquire a healing power thanks to his recent liver transplant, and this superpower of his becomes quite useful when one of his co-workers gets seriously injured at their workplace, which belongs to some rich and prominent religious cult group. The old leader of this religious cult group also recently received an organ transplant (It was a pancreas, by the way), and he soon turns out to be capable of sucking life force from others and then becoming younger in his body. 

Needless to say, once he becomes more aware of his superpower and then comes to learn about Wan-seo and her new friends, the cult leader becomes quite determined to absorb all the superpowers from them by any means necessary, and the movie provides several action sequences as Wan-seo and her new friends are accordingly threatened by the cult leader and his cronies. Around the midpoint of the story, we get a thrilling vehicle sequence amusingly accompanied with a certain famous song performed by David Bowie, and then there is a humorous physical action scene where Wan-seo must help her father a bit when he is supposed to fight against a bunch of thugs sent by the cult leader.

Above all, the screenplay by director/writer Kang Hyeong-cheol, who has steadily advanced his breakthrough hit film “Scandal Makers” (2008), did a solid job of juggling the different superpowers and personalities of its several main characters. While it takes some time as going through its warm-up process along with them, the movie eventually becomes more energetic and spirited once they are ready to function in one way or another along the story, and that is the main reason why we come to care about what is being at stake for them during the expected climactic part filled with lots of bangs and crashes as expected. 

It helps that the five main cast members click well with each other throughout the movie. While Lee Jae-in is the most prominent one in the bunch as her plucky performance functions as the center of the story, Ahn Jae-hong, Ra Mi-ran, Kim Hee-won, and Yoo Ah-in have each own moment to shine around Lee, and the effortless comic chemistry among these five different performers firmly carries the film to the end. In case of several other cast members in the film, Oh Jung-se, Park Jin-young, Shin Goo, and Jin Hee-kyung are well-cast in their respective supporting parts, and Oh steals every minute of his in the film in addition to balancing his role well between comedy and drama.

Unfortunately, the theatrical release of “Hi-Five” in South Korea was delayed for more than two years due to Yoo’s recent big drug abuse scandal, which may also prevent Kang from making two following sequels for completing his planned trilogy. At least, Kang demonstrates here again that he is a filmmaker who really knows how to generate a lot of laughs for us via witty storytelling and engaging characters, and I am sure that he will soon move onto the next step of his commendable filmmaking career.