Half Past Dead (2002) – Review

It may be tough to picture, but once upon a time, the ponytail/tassled jacket combo of Steven Seagal was actually a serious contender when ranking the action stars of the 80s and 90s. Rasping out his lines in a constant near whisper and bitch-slapping anyone in his path with Aikido, even his fairly strange appearance and the fact he couldn’t act didn’t stop movies like Under Seige becoming sizable hits and placing him in a favorable position on the action hero mountain.
Of course, age catches up with us all and if father time started finally laying body shots to peers such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Jean Claude Van Damme, he really did a number of Seagal, cursing the not-so-happy-slapper to a life of cheap, direct-to-video trash released in a near constant stream. In fact, 2002’s Half Past Dead was the final, wide release movie that Seagal ever fronted before DTV beckoned (if you don’t count his villain turn in 2010’s Machete) and he began the transformation that gradually morphed him into the bizarre caricature we know today. So what’s the time reading on his bow out – Half Past Dead, or Quarter Past Shit?

After an FBI raid on on a warehouse owned by crime boss Sonny Eckvall turns into an utter bullet fest, Russian car thief Sasha Petrosevitch catches a stray round while saving his buddy and the criminal who brought him into the organisation, Nick Frazier. After apparently dying for 22 minutes and then spending 8 months rehabilitating, when Sasha is fit enough, we find that he’s been sent to be incarcerated in the newly reopened Alcatraz prison that’s not only still being refurbished as they’re locking new inmates up, but it boasts a shiny, new, bleeding edge execution chamber that strangely allows the condemned to choose from five different methods of death. I guess variety is the spice of life…
Anyway, while Sasha reconnects with Nick, who has also been transfered to the Rock 2.0, we also discover that the first person to “choose his own adventure” is death row inmate Lester McKenna who was responsible for the death of five people after a heist that saw him make off with $200,000,000 worth of gold that’s never been found since he hid them. This proves to be too much temptation for Donny Johnson, the assistant to the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons who has decided to form a gang of terrorists named the 49ers and hijacks the prison by force in order to spring Lester and force him to tell them where the gold is.
For some reason, Sasha isn’t going to take this lying down and with Nick and a bunch of other, eccentric inmates by his side, hopes to take back Alkatraz and save all the hostages that the 49ers have at gun point. But this begs the questions, why does a car thief suddenly want to play Die Hard, and why does he insist on wearing a fucking prison durag for the entirety of the siege?

If we take a glimpse at the credits for Seagal’s last big screen hurrah, we spot a familiar name that’s been practically haunting my reviews lately in the form of Don Michael Paul, who, among other things, has been chipping out a career helping DTV credits such as Company Of Heroes, a Lake Placid sequel, a Scorpion King sequel, a Death Race sequel, two Sniper sequels and a whole bunch of additions to the Tremors franchise. However, with Half Past Dead, we seem to have found the launching point for the low budget kingpin as the final wide release of Seagal’s dubious reign proved to ironically also be Michael Paul’s feature debut in the director’s chair. However, while he’s made a career of expansive, if samey, action sequences in a variety of stripped-back franchises, it’s something of a surprise to see him literally go for broke on a film that’s objectively trash – and yet is virtually impossible to look away from.
Simply put, it looks like Paul has mainlined and endless amount of John Woo and Tsui Hark movies and has tried to attempt the same, super-stylised type of action only with a fraction of the talent and a supporting cast that’s approximately 45% rappers. People suddenly hurl themselves across rooms at a moment’s notice while blazing away with dual wielded pistols as they suddenly abandon all sense of self preservation in order to frantically try and kill someone they’ve never actually seen before. Physics also take an amusing leave of absence whenever the pace picks up and we get to see a Seagal – who rapidly looks more out of shape from scene to scene – suddenly have the ability to fight people while swinging weightlessly from a chain like he’s in some cheapjack version of Crouching Tiger, Squatting Seagal. Of course, it isn’t actually him soaring through the air as his stuntman is wheeled in for virtually everything except dialogue scenes, but considering how bored he openly seems about the whole affair. Maybe it’s because he plainly has absolutely no idea who his co-stars are (rappers Ja Rule and Kurupt respectively who actually looking they’re having a genuine balls) or maybe it’s the fact that he’s inexplicably wearing a black durag for the entire film that’s never explained, but Seagal’s non-performance somehow makes the whole thing funnier.

Also plainly not giving a fuck are the screenwriters who cram the plot with bizarre details that make the whole thing feel like some sort of surreal joke. Why the brand new death chamber would allow inmates to choose between lethal injection, electric chair, firing squad, hanging or gas chamber is anyone’s guess (who the fuck is picking hanging, or the electric chair!?) and the whole subplot of a death row inmate who has made peace with life and seemingly fancies a chat with the monosyllabic Sasha seems to have only been put in place to continue the Seagal-led fallacy that Seagal’s an enlightened dude.
Still, while the villains end up split between walking slabs of dead meat and overacting supervillains who seems to have walked out of a 90s comic, you have to give Morris Chesnut credit for being the only person that’s willing to put in the only half serious performance here. It’s a thankless task, and he really shouldn’t have bothered, but it’s nice to have a yardstick onscreen that truly helps you measure how bad everyone else is.
However, for all of its virtually endless faults, Half Past Dead proves to be actually something of a hilarious experience thanks to how awful most of it truly is. Of course, I’m sure that wasn’t the intention of almost everyone involved, but then surely someone must have been taking the piss by sticking in a random, sizable skydiving rescue sequence with around nine minutes left in the film.

Objectively awful, there’s still something about Seagal’s last gasp before getting fully washed away a torrent of DTV shite that’s incredibly funny. Be it the gravity defying wire work, the copious explosions, or the fact that the soundtrack is literally wall to wall early 2000s rap and death metal, it’s mixture of death and durags proves to have discovered a secret life as an unintentional laugh-factory. And who said Seagal couldn’t do comedy…
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