[Friday Flashback: Movie Edition] Seducing Mr. Perfect

by DaebakGrits

Released: 2006

Genre: Romance, Comedy

Synopsis: Min-joon (Uhm Jung-hwa) is a romantic with an optimistic and trusting approach to relationships. Robin Heiden (Daniel Henney), however, is a cynic who views dating as a competitive game, and he believes the only way to survive the game unscathed is to be the one in power calling all the shots. When these two collide (literally), it’s chaos, but then Min-joon decides to play Robin’s game…

Why You Should (Or Shouldn’t) Watch Seducing Mr. Perfect:

After the last Friday Flashback feature of My Name is Kim Sam-soon, I felt like I didn’t give enough appreciation for Daniel Henney, a half-Korean American who rocketed into South Korean fame during mid-2000s even though he didn’t speak Korean! His success is a bit of an anomaly, but as we all know, a pretty face and chocolate abs can open doors in dramaland. So, in honor of Daniel Henney, I’m switching things up for this Friday Flashback and covering a movie instead of a drama.

While my memory is too foggy to confirm if Seducing Mr. Perfect was the first Korean film I ever watched, it’s definitely one that has stuck with me the longest. Daniel Henney — and his prominently featured pectoral muscles — obviously factored into the unforgettableness of the movie, but I think Seducing Mr. Perfect is more noteworthy because of how the story accommodated Daniel Henney’s lack of Korean fluency.

Instead of having him bumble through Korean dialogue, they established his character, Robin Heiden, as being a multilingual Korean-American businessman who understands Korean but struggles with pronunciation. So, for the duration of the movie, Robin speaks in English while his Korean business partners and his love interest — who are proficient enough in English to comprehend what he’s saying, too — comfortably use their native language to converse with him.

This bilingual arrangement not only works well in context of the plot, but it sets the story up for miscommunication and comical hijinks — most notably when Robin first meets his future love interest Min-joon, who pretends she doesn’t speak English when she accidentally rear ends him in traffic. Of course, in a classic case of it’s-a-small-world-after-all, Min-joon hands Robin her business card, and he realizes she works for him. And that’s how she becomes his reluctant assistant while he’s in South Korea.

The arrangement forces them to be in close proximity, and it’s during this time that Robin deduces — and voices his unsolicited insight — that Min-joon’s boyfriend is cheating on her. And how does he know that her man is a cheater-cheater-pumpkin-eater? Well, Robin recognizes the scummy pattern of behavior because, according to him (and this is a direct quote): “That’s what I do when I cheat.”

That’s right, our leading man openly admits to cheating in his relationships, and his questionable morals don’t end there, folks. No, he also believes that dating is a game, and the way to win — and avoid getting your heart crushed — is by being aloof and in control of the narrative. (Jaded much?)

Despite his flaws, though, Robin remains an appealing character, partly because of his frank, unfiltered honesty, but also because there are a few solid nuggets of advice underneath his disenchanted dating philosophies. His dating pointers aren’t so much “how to get laid and take advantage of people” — as one would expect from a man who cavalierly admits to cheating — but learning to respect oneself and ensuring you don’t give more to a relationship than you’re receiving.

Even so, Min-joon disagrees with his advice and sets out to prove him wrong, but her tactics mostly result in unintended silliness, secondhand embarrassment, and — thanks to one scene in which the writer/director thought it would be funny to mislead Robin into thinking Min-joon was doing the hanky-panky — some borderline incestuous sibling wrestling.

She may be a bit naïve and overly trusting, but I prefer Min-joon’s optimistic approach to dating. Predictably, Robin realizes he does, too, as she works her rom-com magic with her cringey — but mostly adorable — behavior. He falls for her, and the moral of the story, Beanies, is that it’s stupid to play dating games, especially when you’re trying to find a legitimate connection.

But is the happy ending worth sitting through Seducing Mr. Perfect? Overall, it’s a pretty fun story if you take it at face value, and the set-up and execution remind me of Hollywood romantic comedies from the same decade. Plus, it’s a movie, so in the worst case scenario, you only waste 107 minutes of your life — which is a total walk in the park for veteran drama watchers who have slogged through worse and for longer periods of time.

That being said, the time constraint does come with some expected flaws, like secondary characters who lift right out of the plot because they’re one-dimensional. Ironically, the inability to delve deeper into the characters’ backstories might have saved Robin’s characterization because it helps to gloss over some of his less appealing qualities — like his whole “tragic” backstory which led to him being a dating cynic.

Now, I’m not going to spoil this doozy of a reveal for you, but let’s just say if you dwell on it longer than the two seconds the movie dedicates to it, you’ll realize Robin has more red flags than a Swiss National Day parade. Wait — you know what? Watch this movie. I need more people who can laugh with me over the absurd romanticization of Robin’s heartbreak — and bullet wound origin story. (Yeah, you read that last bit correctly, and if that alone doesn’t pique your interest, I don’t know what will.)

 
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