Starring Sol Kyung-gu and Daniel Henney. In Korean, Mandarin, Japanese, and English with English subtitles. Rating not available.

Like other recent South Korean popcorn movies, this spectacularly colourful adventure is a mishmash of genre types, some of which don’t sit that well with each other. The incongruities, however, don’t keep The Spy: Undercover Operation—a title Leslie Nielsen would love—from being wildly entertaining.

When we first meet top spy Kim Chul-soo (Sol Kyng-gu of Oasis and Peppermint Candy), he’s attempting to free kidnapped sailors from African pirates. Money is about to change hands when the guy’s wife calls his cellphone. She’s ovulating, and her mother-in-law is hammering her for not keeping the dynasty going!

The unknowing wife, Young-hee (played somewhat monotonously by Moon So-ri, seen opposite the star in those same, famously good films), is a flight attendant with occasional moxie of her own. The marriage is one of constant bickering and mistrust, and this is played for retrograde laughs. While pulling an overnighter in Thailand, Young-hee gets distracted attentions from a handsome stranger (Korean-American Daniel Henney) she calls “a living work of art” right to his face. He appears unsurprised to hear it.

Dude is actually part of a terror group sabotaging reunification talks and vying with agents from Seoul and the (highly mistrusted) CIA to find a North Korean politician’s daughter who wants to defect with a boatload of secrets. Chul-soo, also in Bangkok because of this situation, just sees his wife with a hunky guy.

This is a directing debut for Lee Seung-jun, who took over when veteran director Lee Myung-se dropped out. He could have worked harder on the tonal shifts and on the sexual politics, but the action scenes are impressive and the comedy has some cheeky elements. In cutaways to a South Korean spy crew watching our Chul-soo’s moves through Google-type glasses, they’re seen checking the effects of their actions on the stock market, in which several are invested. The whole movie, you could say, is one big conflict of interest.