![]() ![]() Those were some heart-pounding 15 seconds, but the audience deserves more. Did the director forget that this man spent most of his life as an Aikido instructor before he became an actor? Seagal does a lot of jogging around and shooting into the air, but his two hand-to-hand combat scenes amount to about 15 seconds long. The main problem with Half Past Dead and why this movie ended Steven Seagal’s theatrical movie career is that the movie should have been released ten years earlier and also because the director, Don Michael Paul, did not take advantage of Seagal’s strengths.Įven older and puffier, Steven Seagal is still an imposing presence yet Don Michael Paul barely used his fighting skills in Half Past Dead. Half Past Dead is neither a boring movie nor a bad action movie. Sascha’s plan is to stop the criminals from succeeding by getting help from the other prisoners, whooping ass, and taking control of the prison. ![]() The criminals are there for one reason only – to pry information from a death-row prisoner who knows where 200 million dollars worth of gold bars are hidden. A group of bad-ass criminals led by 49er One (Morris Chestnut) and 49er Six (Nia Peeples) storm the prison, kill most of the guards, and hold the warden hostage. Sascha Petrosevitch (Steven Seagal) is an undercover FBI agent who is sent to a newly reopened Alcatraz prison, along with his car thief sidekick Nick Frazier (Ja Rule). Half Past Dead was the film that ended Seagal’s career in the theaters, but at least he continues to have success in the straight-to-video film industry. I was one of the few that still went to see Half Past Dead in the theaters, but the film flopped – making a profit of about 5 million bucks. It was cute the first time with DMX but not the second time with Ja Rule. These days he's looking way past dead.When I first saw the trailer for Steven Seagal’s Half Past Dead in 2002, I shook my head in shame as I watched one of America’s best action stars of the 1990s swagger around in a silly-looking bandana in his quest to appeal to teenage audiences as he somewhat successfully attempted in his previous film – Exit Wounds. Once upon a time Seagal's fighting made him look pretty deadly. Seagal gets one good fight sequence - using his hands since the rest of him is so out of shape - leaving Ja Rule to fight most of the battles while schooling the porky martial artist in some ghetto speak. When a terrorist group storms the hi-tech fortress to break out the first convict scheduled to be executed there, Sascha goes into "Under-Siege"-meets-"Die-Hard" mode and takes them on with the help of Rule and the rest of the prison's inmates. ![]() Trying to track down the crime lord responsible for the death of his wife, Sascha befriends Rule's gangsta, Nick, and serves time with him in a newly reopened Alcatraz prison. Trawling for that golden demographic which'll keep him off the straight-to-video slide a little longer, "Half Past Dead" sees Seagal copying the limited success of the "Exit Wounds" formula by hanging with the homies and drafting in rapper Ja Rule for some gunplay. This is as dreary an 'action' film as any Seagal has put his name to (well, maybe not his environmental message movie "On Deadly Ground"). After being shot by the cops, Sascha (Seagal) flatlines, sees the tunnel and the white light, but decides to spurn heaven to come back to kick some more butt. ![]() "Half Past Dead" is the name dreamt up for Seagal's near-death experience in the first reel of the movie. What exactly does it promise? A movie about a time bomb? A terrorist strike? A killer clockmaker? As movie titles go, the clunking moniker of Steven Seagal's latest attempt to convince the world he's still an action man is pretty pathetic. ![]()
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