A sizeable amount of the budget for this lazy film must have been spent on ammunition.
Half Past Dead (2002)
Runtime: 1 hr 38 mins
Synopsis: An undercover FBI agent, Sascha Petrosevitch (Steven Seagal), takes bullets for his buddy, Nick Frazier (Ja Rule). Nick figures Sascha for dead until the two are reunited again on duty at New Alcatraz (a hellish, high-tech version of the now-defunct prison). At New Alcatraz, criminal... An undercover FBI agent, Sascha Petrosevitch (Steven Seagal), takes bullets for his buddy, Nick Frazier (Ja Rule). Nick figures Sascha for dead until the two are reunited again on duty at New Alcatraz (a hellish, high-tech version of the now-defunct prison). At New Alcatraz, criminal mastermind Lester (Bruce Weitz) is set to be executed. Lester knows the whereabouts of a fortune in gold, but isn't talking. With only hours to live, Lester takes a meeting with Sascha, just as corrupt prison official Donny (Morris Chestnut) and his gang (including Nia Peebles) raid New Alcatraz by helicopter and take Lester and a Supreme Court justice hostage. Highly energetic action scenes pay respect to the films of John Woo, and director Don Michael Paul makes many tasteful choices in the film's editing and music. [More]
Genre: Action/Adventure
Starring: Steven Seagal, Morris Chestnut, Ja Rule, Tony Plana, June McPherson
Screenwriter: Don Michael Paul
Producer: Elie Samaha, Alison Semenza, Steven Seagal, Uwe Schott
DVD Info
Release:
Dec 8, 2008
Blu-ray Disc Features:
- Anamorphic Widescreen 1.85
Audio:
- Dolby Digital TrueHD 5.1 - English
- Subtitles - Chinese, French, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai
Reviews
Sometimes, when you've just wasted a tenner and a perfectly good evening watching another dumb, gratuitously gun-filled, hackneyed, nonsensical action picture, don't you wish you were as thick, lazy and easily pleased as Hollywood wants you to be?
It's quite slick, but Seagal's fans won't necessarily get what they paid for.
Look upon his fleshy neck, his dodgy hair and his strangely puffy immobile face, ye pantywaist liberals, and tremble!
It's absolutely worthless nonsense that's almost bad enough to make me wish cinema had never been invented.
Once upon a time Seagal's fighting made him look pretty deadly. These days he's looking way past dead.
Here's yet another deafening, preposterous action movie created for extremely undemanding audiences that don't care about logic and coherence.
The title of this dismal action flick refers to the Seagal character's having suffered a near-death experience, though he's returned from the other side with a remarkable lack of insight.
Half Past Dead may be the year's funniest unintentional comedy for its inane plot, repetitive, unimaginative stunts and dreadful dialogue.
...makes something retarded like Con Air look like an absolute action classic. And that's saying something.
Half Past Dead translated from Latin means 'Die Hard in a prison,' or so the filmmakers must have believed.
The movie doesn't even work as a vehicle for Ja Rule, who's perfectly likable but gets lost in the hullabaloo of helicopter crashes, hostage negotiations, and assault weapons.
Some of Seagal's action pictures are guilty pleasures, but this one is so formulaic that it seems to be on auto-pilot.
Three things you can do that would be less painful than sitting through Steven Seagal's latest film "Half Past Dead": Cover your head in honey and stick it down an ant hole; Go clothes shopping with the Olsen twins; Sit through an IRS audit.
If it's another regurgitated action movie you're after, there's no better film than Half Past Dead.
I have no problem with the fact that [Seagal] doesn't use a Russian accent (Do they ever?), but he looks out of shape and tired.
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