Final Rating: 4/5
In Hi-Five, five organ transplant recipients discover they’ve gained superpowers following their operations. As they bond and explore their newfound abilities, they soon find themselves hunted by a new-age cult leader with the ability to steal life from people.
The superpowers in Hi-Five are closer to Mystery Men than X-Men, and writer-director Kang Hyung-chul has a lot of fun with their potential. Tank Boy (Ahn Jae-hong) received a lung transplant, giving him extraordinarily strong breath, which he mostly uses to defeat people by sneezing at them. To train his ability, he learns to play a recorder held by someone else several feet away.
Bluetooth Man (Yoo Ah-in) can snap his fingers to exert total control over any electronic device. This ability almost single-handedly wins many of the team’s fights, but most notably ensures there’s always some 80s pop song scoring the action scenes. Fresh Girl (Ra Mi-ran) doesn’t have any superpowers of her own, but can amplify and transfer the abilities of her teammates.
The most conventional ability belongs to Nine Girl (Lee Jae-in), who is also the emotional core of the film. After receiving a heart transplant, Nine Girl gains super strength and super speed. Her father, an Olympic Taekwondo athlete, still worries about her heart condition, cautioning her from any kind of strenuous activities. Of course, with her newfound powers, she swiftly goes from needing protection to being the main protector and balancing that responsibility with keeping her powers secret from her father, which makes for some of the film’s best action scenes.
The standout fight of the film sees Nine Girl and her father team up to fend off a group of hooligans. Nine Girl’s father haphazardly unleashes his strongest Taekwondo moves, barely missing with every hit. Just outside his vision, Nine Girl mirrors his moves, adding extra power to each and taking care to make her attacks actually connect. The effect is that her father looks immensely powerful to his assailants, even surprising himself.
Familial connections are a main theme of Hi Five. In addition to the found family of the core group and Nine Girl’s relationship with her father, the bad guys have family built into their core. The main antagonists are the cult leader Seo Young-chun (played by Shin Goo and later Park Jin-Young) and his daughter, an eternally loyal acolyte who Seo pays no mind to. Another of the Five, Battery Man (Kim Hee-won), begins the film as a member of the cult, having abandoned his own family out of reverence to Seo, his Eternal Lord, only tearfully pulling away in the final minutes of the movie.
Seo uses his cult as a gateway to political power, until his newfound superpowers allow him to pivot to literal power over life and death. The selfishness of his pursuits is almost juvenile: Seo hardly acknowledges his followers except to demand their fealty. And yet, his cult worships him unconditionally. Those close enough to see him for who he is, like his daughter and Battery Man, still cling to him as if by obligation. Director Kang’s exciting world of cults and fringe medicine is a refreshing take on the superhero genre that will leave the audience hungry for more adventures with its titular super team . As a standalone, though, Hi-Five is exciting, original, and a blast to watch.
Hi-Five was seen during the 2025 Fantasia Festival. Thank you to Well Go USA for the screener.
