Review: 'Hi-Five' struggles to find its superpowers

Picture this: Two newly minted superhumans discover their extraordinary abilities and decide to ... play the recorder.

One holds the instrument at arm's length while the other provides the breath from across a playground using his turbocharged lung capacity. This moment of laughable absurdity perfectly encapsulates what director Kang Hyeong-cheol is going for in "Hi-Five" — a goofy superhero ensemble that wears its dumb-fun ambitions like a badge of honor.

It doesn't take long for viewers to appreciate the film's greatest virtue — its refusal to dawdle. Take out a stopwatch and you'll find out that our protagonists discover their powers and find each other in under 10 minutes of runtime. It is a refreshing reprieve from the usual formula of prolonged soul-searching and clunky exposition that typically accompanies superhero origin stories. Here, supernatural abilities are simply accepted as fact, with no existential hand-wringing required.

Though his heyday feels increasingly distant, Kang has proven himself a reliable architect of crowd-pleasers before, with "Scandal Makers" (2008) and "Sunny" (2011) delivering impressive box office returns through their blend of nostalgia and heartfelt laughter. Now he returns to the superhero genre, without the grandiosity that usually accompanies such territory. Unapologetically feel-good comedy remains Kang's specialty, and he pursues it here with shameless dedication, for better and decidedly for worse.

The premise unfolds with remarkable simplicity: friendless teenager Wan-seo (Lee Jae-in) gains superhuman strength after a heart transplant, living under the watchful eye of her overprotective father (Oh Jung-se). When a YouTube video surfaces of her sprinting up a neighborhood hill at impossible speeds, she's approached by Ji-sung (Ahn Jae-hong), an unemployed loser whose enhanced lungs allow him to generate hurricane-force winds with his mouth.

They immediately recognize each other through mysterious tattoo-like marks that identify transplant recipients with supernatural gifts. This convenient plot device facilitates their eventual team-up with Ki-dong (Yoo Ah-in), a hipster-wannabe who manipulates electronics with finger snaps, Yak-sun (Kim Hee-won), a factory manager with healing powers, and Sun-nyeo (Ra Mi-ran), a perpetually cheerful yogurt seller whose true abilities remain undisclosed until much later.

The film proceeds with an almost dogged willingness to jettison intricate world-building in favor of lighter gimmicks. The original organ donor who bestowed these powers remains a deliberate MacGuffin, at no point explained nor explored. Instead, Kang chooses to zero in on the small-scale comic mishaps that spring from these bumbling superheroes' daily encounters.

The comedy finds its rhythm in the bickering back-and-forth between Ahn and Yoo's characters, a dynamic built entirely on petty grievances, such as who ate more chicken wings. Beneath all that squabbling, a predictable bromance soon emerges, following the familiar beats of mismatched buddy comedy.

The cast inhabits their archetypal roles with grounded, humane warmth. Lee Jae-in infuses teenage earnestness into the plucky Wan-seo, while Ra Mi-ran and Ahn Jae-hong slip effortlessly into the down-to-earth personas they perfected in the beloved drama "Reply 1988." Even Yoo Ah-in, whose artist mystique seems fundamentally at odds with broad comedy, settles convincingly into his role as a pathetic reprobate who primarily uses his abilities to cheat at underground gambling establishments.

In terms of action, "Hi-Five" conjures a fever dream of flying fists and rubber reality with a hefty 15 billion won ($11 million) budget, channeling old-school slapstick through a VFX-enhanced funhouse mirror. The most memorable set piece involves Sun-nyeo's yogurt cart careening through narrow streets at breakneck speed, propelled by Wan-seo's superhuman strength, as Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" blasts in the background.

All of these elements would have cohered nicely if only the humor actually landed. Regrettably, "Hi-Five's" endless comic sequences fall resolutely flat, their timing and execution feeling mechanically stale. Kang remains admirably earnest in both tone and approach, but the problem is that his comedic sensibilities feel like retreads of material that perhaps worked best 20 years ago. His humor occupies a frustratingly safe middle ground throughout, with pratfalls and punchlines that feel recycled from a dusty comedy playbook. At one point the film even stoops to tired gay panic comedy, lingering on two men accidentally kissing in a sequence that lands with an audible thud.

As canned bits accumulate like dead weight, the narrative's graver elements give way to an increasingly uncomfortable friction. Kang's earlier films (especially "Swing Kids") managed to weave levity through darker material with mixed results, creating tonal dissonance that often felt more ambitious than coherent. Here, that same tension reaches breaking point — when the humor consistently misfires, the backstory involving a grotesque organ-harvesting cult feels fundamentally divorced from the film's feel-good vibes. The prolonged sequences showing delirious cult followers and forced organ removal feel not just misplaced, but actively corrosive to the film's comedic foundation.

After all, "Hi-Five's" cardinal sin lies in its lukewarm, dated comedy that never commits to being genuinely silly or genuinely smart. Fans of aggressively corny humor might extract a chuckle or two, but it's doubtful whether this tired schtick will resonate with contemporary audiences.

"Hi-Five" hits Korean theaters Friday.