IslandGuru Who payed the critics

Thehibikiew Not even bad in a good way

ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Serpico Jones 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!

hizman 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.

Dalazen_Junior Interesting film for Steven Seagal fans, this was released in Brazil in the beginning of this year, because here Seagal has a big audience. It's surprisingly an interesting drama about a father (Jun Lee) trying to raise his daughter alone, in the midst of pursuing a career as a fighter. Steven Seagal plays Jun Lee's final opponent and although you are at first guided to believe that he is the villain, he turns out a good surprise at the end. The drama and the acting were great and made this an above the average Korean effort, the fights were well-staged. (SPOILERS AHEAD) Jun Lee's fight with Seagal is greatly done and shot, but painful to watch due to its violence: Jun Lee is beaten up (horribly) by Steven Seagal, in front of his daughter, in a segment that dissolves into three grueling, punishing rounds, but at least gets to go all the three rounds without giving up. Seagal reveals himself as a great actor, by the way, you see that although his character is defeating Jun Lee's, Steven feels sorry for the pain he is inflicting on Jun Lee, but doesn't have a choice, since the guy just won't stay down(END OF SOILERS).I believe that many people who are skeptical about action films should give this a try, it won't disappoint.

ryan larson 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.