It might be reading too much in to say that this is an anti death penalty film, but several interesting sections suggest this. It also falters wherever it tries to inject emotional sincerity, especially in a scene where the uninteresting main bad guy does a Lecter-esque examination of a hostage’s psyche which completely fails to convince.
It’s not often you notice the editing on a film, but this is plagued by weird sections of slow/fast motion which make it feel like an episode of Green Wing. Admittedly there’s not a lot to do with the horribly written dialogue, and he doesn’t exactly stand out for his bad acting among the rest of the cast, but it might have been improved with a Stallone or even a Van Damme. He’s like a fatter Piers Morgan with even less talent. He’s a terrbile actor, and not in the funny and distinctive Arnold Schwarzenegger way or the elephant-in-the-room Ewan McGregor way. I’m not sure why it has such an absurd title, but it may be a reference to Steven Seagal, who has all the charisma of roadkill. It’s a kind of prison escape film in reverse so all the people shooting each other up are conveniently already incarcerated. Set in a newly re-opened Alcatraz prison, Half Past Dead is a self-contained action flick which sees a group of militant criminals invade the island fortress to rescue a death row prisoner who’s sitting on a $200m fortune. When I saw a Seagal film called Half Past Dead for 75p with the tagline “The good, the bad and the deadly” I couldn’t not buy it could I? Strictly for research purposes, of course.
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Others viewers will be a bit harder to sell on this premise, but even in their case, you could definitely find worse if you're looking for a way to spend the evening in front of the television.With the Expendables rumour mill working at full capacity there’s one name that’s not been mentioned for a while: Steven Seagal.
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Essentially, it's the kind of movie that makes hotdogs and popcorn taste even better.ĭiehard Seagal fans will not want to be without this one. If that's not enough, then judge on the fact that HPD is built entirely upon fun: whereas flicks like The Foreigner would focus excruciatingly on stories that no one understood, HPD is a straightforward action vehicle that makes no secret of being silly but boasts some definite adrenaline. Though the latter have a knack for ending disappointingly, the encounters are fast-paced and range from an unexpected Nia Peebles/Ja Rule confrontation to an acrobatic Seagal/Chestnut tussle on 15-foot hanging chains. The gunfights are numerous and diverse - the final shootout in the cell block is pure action fantasy - and the hand-to-hand fights are similarly nice, with nifty choreography by Xin Xin Xiong ( Seven Swords ) proving that Seagal still had the moves at the time he went straight-to-video. However, once we consider that this is a Steven Seagal film, we begin to appreciate it for its good points, all of which come back the fact that it's a return to action for our hero. Add a few silly scenes - like Seagal "accidentally" hurling Ja Rule out of his car as a joke without reprimand - and it's easy to see why this film didn't do too well at the box office. In addition, whoever was in charge of the editing and camerawork deserves a swat on the nose: endless slow-motion is topped by hit-and-miss cinematography that develops a trend of showing guns being pointed and fired but not who was shot. Ja Rule's weasily performance in particular is best left forgotten. Seagal is probably the first man to play a Russian without an accent, and nobody in the film acts with any kind of memorable finesse. Style- and story-wise, "Half Past Dead" is a combination of Seagal's Exit Wounds and Sean Connery's The Rock, but there's really no comparison when it comes to dramatic strength. Sasha must now rally the prisoners to the side of justice and use his uncanny abilities to foil the plot. Before long, the in-prison execution of an infamous gold thief (Bruce Weitz, Hill Street Blues ) is interrupted by terrorists eager to find his hidden treasure (headed by Morris Chestnut and Nia Peebles ). The plot: car thief Sasha Petrosevich (Seagal) and his friend and partner Nick (Ja Rule, The Fast and the Furious ) are busted by the FBI and sent to the newly-opened Alcatraz. Less passionate or non-fans of Seagal will almost certainly catch onto the film's faults, but devotees shouldn't be disillusioned: our hero's last theatrical outing is worth watching. Indeed, this tends to make more casual viewers like a film less, but as someone raised on the man's poorer DTV outings, I found HPD a surprisingly exhilarating departure from the repetitive wrist-snapping, stale shootouts, and nonsensical storylines of the majority of the aikido master's lesser films. I'll say it right away: I like "Half Past Dead" mainly because it has Steven Seagal in it.
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