Half Past Dead seems to be an accurate description of Steven Segal’s film career of late which does not bode well for this flick. Back in the day I was a big fan of Mr. Segal and always new when he had a new film coming out. This hard as nails Aikido master redefined marital arts in films for a while (check out some amazing real life action here). We were all used to high kicking Van Damme, so to see Segal render multiple attackers helpless with his Aikido moves was highly impressive. Since then we seem to have moved on to wire work and people flying all over the place, personally I think I prefer the old Segal films.
Steven Segal has many accomplishments, accolades and abilities, but being able to pick a decent script is not one of them. His early films brought us something new culminating in the smash hit Under Siege. His environmental concerns then started to influence his films in On Deadly Ground and Fire Down Below and things started going pear shaped. The big Hollywood films dried up and his films started heading towards straight to DVD status.
Half Past Dead was made in 2002, a period in which Segal was still making the occasional half decent film. The plot is based around the re-opening of Alcatraz. The first victim of its state of the art execution chamber, Lester McKenna, intends on taking the location of $200 million in stolen gold bullion to the grave. Ex-soldier and criminal mastermind Donald Johnson (Morris Chestnut) hates to see good bullion go to waste and so, with the aid of a gang of heavily armed mercenaries, takes over the island with the intention of relieving Lester of his secret.
Unbeknownst to Mr. Johnson, Sasha Petrosevitch (Segal) is undercover, serving time with Nicolas Frazier (Ja Rule) to gain his confidence so that he can get on the inside of a huge crime syndicate. Mr. Johnson’s primary bargaining chip to stop the FBI retaking the island is high court justice Jane McPherson. The only chance Sasha has of rescuing the Judge and Lester is to rally his fellow convicts against the attackers and retake Alcatraz.
I think this film marked a real downturn in the quality of script that Steven Segal was being offered. The plot develops very slowly, for the first half hour of the film it seems that the main plot is centered around Sasha taking down the crime syndicate. Suddenly there’s a shift in focus as Sasha and Nicolas get sent to Alcatraz. The plot then has a brief pause whilst our protagonists settle into prison routine and then Lester, and his hidden gold, suddenly hoves into view and the island is suddenly being attacked.
The production values are OK, but with a trend in recent years for gritty realistic violence, the action in this film falls short of the mark. Many thousands of rounds of ammunition are expended and the thing most commonly hit are the railings, or any piece of random metal that can send sparks flying. Shots are fired as people are flying through the air or dangling upside down on ropes. The hand to hand action fares a bit better as you’d expect in a Steven Segal film, but there’s nothing that he hasn’t already done ten times better in his earlier films. A PG-13 rating in the states (15 over here) strangled any potential out of the film, action is dumbed down and rap songs in the soundtrack are noticeably censored.
As well as a strangely developed plot, we also get poorly developed characters, we don’t actually get told Sasha’s motivation until near the end of the film, and characters that one minute look to be an integral part of the story, then almost entirely drop out of the film. The main one of note here is the prison warden El Fuego (played by Tony Plana) one minute he’s shaping up to be quite an interesting character as he gives an introduction speech to the inmates, then he pretty much disappears, only to resurfaces briefly at the end. In terms of the acting quality on display Tony Plana for me is the only one who came remotely close to earning his money and Ja Rule should have money taken from him for the rest of his life!
The picture on this Blu Ray is good enough for HD content. You won’t use it to show of your shiny new HD equipment, but I’ve seen much worse. Along with the over the top action comes a nice and noisy soundtrack. If you have a surround sound setup then your sub will get a good workout with the bass heavy rap songs that pop up in the soundtrack and with all the general pyrotechnics throughout the film.
Action film fans may want to add this to their rental list, but I’d only really recommend buying this to die hard Segal fans. Mildly entertaining, but mostly annoying seeing a potentially good film bungled. The most amazing thing about this is that they made a sequel!