Clementine (2004)

I rented these movie expecting other thing but I must say that it has been a nice surprise.Is not a Steven Seagal's movie, he just appears on a cameo, the real star of the movie is seo woo eun a little girl with an amazing acting skills. the movie is a drama about a father who quit his fighting career to look after his daughter. the action scenes are really well done as the dramatic scenes that are really well played by the actors.My personal favorite scene is the one in which the little girl starts singing the song Clementine and finally end up crying on the window looking the city lights.is a really great movie, a martial arts drama but if you only expect an action film is not your movie

As a fan of Asian (especially Korean) movies I just had to look this up. Korean martial arts movie with Steven Seagal! How cool is that, huh? Well, not much. The film itself seemed do not know what it wanted to be.It starts like some gangster/cop action drama. The protagonist, as an ex-fighter and martial artist, takes out punch of criminals in illegal casino. He retires from police and we see heartwarming relationship between him and his adorable daughter. Then the gangsters force the protagonist to fight again. Then we see one poorly directed and edited cage fight scene. The daughter cries. Then comes some woman who appears to be the biological mother of the girl. More drama follows and the girl cries again. The daughter gets kidnapped just to force the father to fight one more time but this time his opponent is unbeatable cage fight master (Steven Seagal). Another fight scene. The girl cries again (it becomes annoying). Then comes Steven Seagal and says something meaningful. The girl stops crying (finally). Happy end!Steven Seagal's part is quite brief and we can't see him much in the final fight either. The drama parts between the Korean actors were played out pretty well and the story around the girl was rather interesting and quite enjoyable.It would have been much better movie as a simple drama without those poor action sequences. And maybe if the father would have been played by Steven Seagal. The premise: An American Taekwondo champion living in Korea with his seven year old daughter and then the supposedly dead mother comes up. That would have been cool!

It was with some trepidation that I watched Clementine the other day, because I had heard nothing but a relentless stream of terrible things about it. I was surprised to see that it's a Korean film in every way, given Seagal's background in Japanese martial arts and the fact that he speaks fluent Japanese. But make no mistake, Clementine is not a Seagal movie, it's an action comedy that's heavy on the comedy (and cheap drama, for some reason) and light on the action. The only problem is that the comedy is spotty at best and Seagal's presence on the cover box serves only to make us wonder where he is for the whole movie.The story is about Kim, a fallen Korean Taekwon-do champion who leaves his country when a bad referee call costs him the championship title. He moves to Los Angeles and becomes a cop and never goes back to Korea, although he must live in Korea tow because he and he speaks nothing but Korean, as do his colleagues and his daughter. Having lost his fighting career, he decides to concentrate on a career in law enforcement and taking care of his daughter. A fight promoter is trying to get him back in the ring but Kim doesn't want to get back into fighting.Kim's daughter is impossibly cute and takes after her father. When Kim gets called in to talk to the principal because his daughter beat up some kid that was teasing her, Kim scowls at the kid and says, "Well you got what you deserved, didn't you!" Unfortunately, there is a stupid sub-plot involving the girl's mother that serves to do nothing but make a light- hearted, half-witted comedy pretty thoroughly depressing. The little girl who plays Kin's daughter has some great scenes, but it seems like she was just screaming and crying for about the last 30 minutes or so of the film. Oh and remember that huge black guy in Underworld? The one that did that weird thing where he's trying to make his voice so deep that it just calls attention to his crappy acting? That guy is in this movie, and he's still doing that stupid thing with his voice. Maybe someone forgot to tell him that he's not in a vampire movie anymore. But it's pretty much in tune with the rest of the awful acting in the movie, although Dong-jung Lee, who plays the main character, does have some pretty funny moments, especially in the first half of the film, which is the best part of the movie and I would argue that it's even pretty entertaining and fun.It's revealing about the rest of the movie that the formidable talent of Seagal himself is completely wasted. He has nothing to do in the entire movie except do what he does worst in all his other movies – show up at the end and make some goofy speech and then wander off screen in slow motion. Yawn. But this is not a Seagal movie, it's a Korean martial arts comedy where he makes a brief appearance at the end, in one of the film's only English scenes. If they had kept up the almost family comedy sitcom story of the first half of the movie it could have been fun, light-hearted fare, but trying to give us this dramatic social situation involving the little girl and her missing mother and the whole thing with Seagal just turned it into a muddled mess.

I am a huge Seagal fan, and you will find my reviews on most of his films on this site. I ordered Clementine via Amazon more to complete my collection as I had read that Seagal has "little more than a cameo" in this film. My biggest compliment to Seagal is, this film had to have been filmed on a small budget...and I highly doubt Seagal is hurting for cash...so he must have done this film in gratitude to somebody involved with either the production or direction. The fight scenes are decent-however one can clearly see that it is not Seagal in the cage when the camera is shooting from a farther distance. It reminded me of the fight scenes in "Half Past Dead" thugh they lasted a little longer. Decent movie, hard to get into because of the subtitles, definitely a film only for hardcore Seagal fans.