Desafio Final

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.

Let's start with a warning: If you're looking to see this for Steven Seagal then rent it or borrow it do not buy it because you will be majorly disappointed. Seagal is on screen for maybe ten minutes if you include all of the shots of him on TV monitors. If you don't count the monitors its a couple of minutes less, and its a not very good fight scene.

The real star of the movie is Dong-jun Lee who is a karate champion who lost in a rigged match (which I think was against Seagal). The match occurred as his wife/girlfriend went into labor and gave birth to their daughter. The wife/girlfriend dies on the delivery table and the girl was put into an orphanage from which Lee retrieves her. Years pass and Lee becomes a cop. After he breaks heads while making a bust he is forced to retire from the force and turns to cage fighting to pay off his debts to the people who's heads he broke. He's such a good fighter (yea right) that the mob wants him to fight the world champion Steven Seagal. However in between all of that is a great deal of soap opera as the mother is found not to be dead and wants to get her little girl back (or some such nonsense).

Its awful.In between hitting the fast forward to get to something interesting and watching badly acted scenes at normal speed I sat there slack jawed at just how incredibly stupid this movie is. What kind of movie is it? Comedy? Family Drama? Its not really an action film. What is Seagal doing in this movie? If he did it for a paycheck he got all of the money. My guess is that this was suppose to be a family drama of some sort and somehow Seagal got roped in to doing a days shooting. The producers were happy because they now had a film that they could market as a Steven Seagal flick. Since there is no real release outside of Asia my guess is that anyone looking to release this saw it for what it was and dropped it. You will not be seeing this any time soon playing on American TV (or any other TV for that matter.)

Avoid this one. Its just not worth it. Yes, it has a few good moments, hence a 2 out of 10 rating, but its just a mess of a movie thats not even good enough to make fun of.

(NB:If you must see Seagals scenes fast forward to one hour and twenty three minutes in)

This is quite possibly THE worst movie I've ever seen in my life. I cannot believe all the positive reviews on this travesty of so-called 'film'. Only explanation to those reviews are that they're probably not native Korean speakers and therefore cannot comprehend what's really going on. Poor acting, poor casting, and one of the most unoriginal plot in history of movie making makes this movie a classic. Steven Seagal? Why? They spent more dough on casting him than the entire film making. Not to mention the first part of the movie... where Seagal is fighting years back... and it's somebody else! I think Seagal signed a contract where he CANNOT participate in a movie if his role plays over 5 minutes. They dubbed this garbage as a 'mixed martial arts movie' in Korea when it got all trendy all of a sudden, to target the UFC and Pride fans. What a disappointment.. There is at least one positive aspect of this film, at the end... a classic humor, I might add. Main character goes, "Taekwondo is a state of mind" with the worst Korean accent and Seagal touches his heart saying, "I know..." if this isn't the cheesiest line of all time, I don't know what is. It did make me laugh hard... so I got my money's worth on this one.

Clementine (2004)

This is easily the worst movie I have watched so far in Seagal's filmography, obviously a quick payday for him. He brings nothing to this except his name. He had not even appeared in it before I turned it off an hour in.

Quick synopsis the main star of the movie is a karate champion who lost a rigged fight (possibly against Seagal) I'm not 100% sure. As he is fighting this fight his wife dies during childbirth and his daughter put into an orphanage. He gets her back, stops fighting and becomes a cop. He loses that job for being too aggressive and turns to cage fighting to pay the bills!! Then in a move only a soap opera writer from Days Of Our Lives could come up with, the mother did not die and she wants her little girl back.

Forgettable.

I downloaded the movie just because I am fond of Steven Seagal and watched every movie with him both in English and Russian. This one was a very emotional story rather on parenting and family issues than action and Aikido. Seagal briefly showed up in but a few episodes so this is not really a type of movie for his fans.

I never saw a single Korean movie so I was moved by the family and parenting line. Overall directorship is what they call at Yahoo! "flawed but worthy" :) Seagal's acting is rather nominal.

A minor but striking flaw of the scenario was that the Korean godfather always had a Bible with him. No logic at all because he was the bad guy and his Scripture quotes were really inappropriate. It was an apparent attack on Christianity as the Western (American/European) religion. Steven Seagal himself never used religion in diminishing terms although his own choice is rather Zen Buddhism than Christianity.

My own rating would be "flawed but worthy" while for an action movie fan, it's fairly a waste of time.