In the Season 4 Simpsons episode “I Love Lisa,” you can pinpoint the exact second Lisa Simpson rips Ralph Wiggum’s heart in half on live TV. In 2002’s Half Past Dead, you can just as easily pinpoint the moment Steven Seagal stopped being a bankable blockbuster star, sealing his fate as a direct-to-video regular after its disastrous release.
With a 3 percent critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s not hard to see why.
That magic moment in Half Past Dead
I don’t watch movies passively. I’m like Alex from A Clockwork Orange, eyes pried open, forcing myself to absorb every frame. I paid full attention to Half Past Dead from start to finish. Still, I had to consult Wikipedia afterward just to understand what I’d seen.
A Meatgrinder Of Action Movie Tropes
Half Past Dead follows Steven Seagal’s Sasha Petrosevitch, an undercover FBI agent posing as a Russian car thief to get close to Nick Frazier (Ja Rule), a smooth-talking criminal. During the film’s opening raid, Sasha gets shot and nearly dies. His heart stops for 22 minutes, which eventually leads a background character literally saying he made it to “half past dead” so you don’t forget the name of the movie you’re watching.
Eight months later, for some reason, Sasha and Nick are checking into a newly renovated, heavily fortified Alcatraz as if it were an airport hotel. There, they meet Warden Juan Ruiz “El Fuego” Escarzaga (Tony Plana), the gleefully unhinged Warden obsessed with his new high-tech death chamber.
Meanwhile, prisoner Lester McKenna (Bruce Weitz) is on death row for stealing $200 million in gold and killing five agents. He plans to die without revealing where the money is hidden. As his execution nears, a gang of terrorists called the 49ers (sigh) storms Alcatraz to steal the loot and kill anyone in their way.
Oh, and Nick still has no clue Sasha is an undercover agent, even though there’s no other logical reason for two long-standing partners in crime to end up in the same high-security prison at the exact same time.
Guns, Guns, Guns, “Aight”
In Half Past Dead, Steven Seagal and Ja Rule try to pull off a buddy-cop dynamic and fail miserably. There’s even a running gag about how to properly say “alright.”
Ja Rule and Steven Seagal in Half Past Dead
By the third act, I half-expected them to argue over whether to play country or rap in the commissary as they swat each other’s hands away from the radio dial. Spoiler: they don’t. But they do fire a lot of guns.
Naturally, there’s one more test of friendship before things fully heat up. Sasha gets exposed as the highly trained FBI agent with a mysterious past that he’s always been, then proceeds to single-handedly save everyone using his martial arts mastery and uncanny knowledge of Alcatraz’s layout despite having just arrived there. It’s a Steven Seagal movie, so sure, let’s roll with it.
As of this writing, you can stream Half Past Dead on Hulu and Tubi. But trust me when I say you don’t have to.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
