In a year that has brought us such unwatchable crapulence as Feardotcom and Rules of Attraction comes the compulsory Steven Seagal lameness Half Past Dead. Really a straight to video film projected in multiplexes, Half Past Dead makes a valiant but failed effort to clear the worst-movie-of-the-year bar that has been set this time at an unbelievable height.
The set-up of this one is such an old standard that anyone can sing along. A martial artist and all-around hardass goes to a new high-tech prison of the future with unfinished business over the death of his wife. He and his partner, who of course is in the same high-tech prison of the future, must then prove themselves to be former bad guys while they fight even badder guys. Things explode, quips are exchanged, and racial differences are explored. Following the award-winning aging-martial-artist-plus-popular-rapper formula that provided us with the classic Exit Wounds, Half Past Dead teams Seagal with Ja Rule. Oddly, it is Ja Rule who delivers his lines with some conviction while Seagal is the one with the stilted delivery of a miscast athlete cameo.
In the interest of fairness, I should point out that while I am a research fiend, somehow, in my many years of filmgeekdom, I have never actually seen a Steven Seagal picture until this one. But the Seagal expert I brought to the screening proclaimed Half Past Dead to be worse than Seagal’s straight-to-video The Patriot, not to be confused with the Mel Gibson Braveheart remake.
Half Past Dead mixes a poorly chosen mishmash of extreme facial close ups of grimacing and poorly-lit long shots of clumsy punching and kicking. In the long shots, Seagal’s lumbering frame does a few scenes of truly unmemorable fighting, and in the close-ups, his swollen face looms in and out of the darkness like some fifth-rate Col. Kurtz. In fact, if there’s one positive thing to be said for the picture, it’s that the huge percentage of sharply focused close-ups makes one vastly aware and a little afraid of the concept of pores.
The parts of the movie that aren’t dull and/or dominated by pores are so joylessly silly that even the most cynical won’t find so much as a nugget of camp enjoyment. The rest of the plot, such as it is, revolves around buried gold and capital punishment and a highly trained but sorely inaccurate crew of treasure-seeking hostage-takers. While your average action picture goes for gasps and oohs, this one gets mostly sighs and groans.
Seagal’s eventual revenge on the man responsible for his wife’s death is dealt with off-screen. Not in that “it’s more dramatic ’cause we don’t see it kind of way” but more in the “well it doesn’t really have anything to do with anything in this movie so I’ll just offhandedly mention that we really took care of that guy” kind of way. As The Hurricane so wisely said, “What’s up with that?”
Often in a picture like this, the only silver lining is the supporting cast but if you hadn’t figured it out yet, Half Past Dead comes up short in every category. A good indicator of that comes in the form of Stephen J. Cannell. For those of you who didn’t recognize that name, think back to some of the shows you loved in the ’80s that ended with a guy finishing the typing of the script and threw the last page onto a pile of papers. That guy was Cannell, and a talented actor he is not.
Representing the fairer sex is Babylon 5′s Claudia Christian as the FBI agent on the outside and the Party Machine herself, Nia Peeples, as the bad girl in black leather and blue eye shadow. She’s the kind of girl who keeps her tight abs showing during a high risk assault with a team wearing body armor. In the seats of authority are Linda Thorson, the poor man’s Sharon Lawrence, and Tony Plana, the homeless man’s Edward James Olmos.
This picture is bad. Really bad. Sadly, it isn’t even enjoyably bad. Half Past Dead is just a lame head kicker with a weak plot, weak action, and non-existent acting. Even the both of the world’s Seagal fans should take a pass on this one, and thank their lucky stars that in a year that has sunk so cinematically low, a turd like Half Past Dead won’t be remembered long enough to hurt Seagal’s career remnants or Ja Rule’s record sales. As far as awful action flicks go skip this one and save your pennies for the upcoming Extreme Ops. At least you might get to laugh a bit.
