Great Film: Half Past Dead
The Rock has become a tourist attraction?!?
Yeah, a long time ago it turned into a tourist attraction. Now it's a
prison again. Kind of. Well, it's more like an airport mixed together
with a junior high school but there are lots of guys running around
wearing orange jumpsuits, so I guess in that way it's like a prison.
Not really though. When Sasha, Steven Seagal's character, is being
admitted into prison, he's standing shackled in line and wanders over
to a different line so he can talk to his friend, like he's in line for
the security check at the airport. Then before too long he and his
friend are throwing punches, smacking around a couple of security
guards.
Let me tell you something. You assault a corrections officer in a
federal prison, they'll shoot you on the spot. Ja Rule would have been
shot about 30 times before he threw his second punch. Oh, and there are
guys wearing beanies and bandanas and whatnot. In prison. Federal
prison.
You can't dress like that at most high schools in America.
Speaking of Ja Rule, I have to say that the person who probably enjoyed
his performance more than anyone else on earth, including Ja Rule
himself, had to have been 50 Cent. Just before I watched this movie I
saw one of those shows on TV about the greatest celebrity feuds ever,
and like number 7 or 8 was this rivalry between 50 Cent, who had lived
the thug life for real, and Ja Rule. Who had not. Every time I saw Ja
Rule on screen the only thing I could picture was 50 Cent laughing his
ass off. Ja Rule looks like a rowdy 9-year-old every time he appears on
screen.
Anyway, getting back to the plot. It's funny. Sasha is an FBI agent
working undercover and he agrees to let himself be sentenced to prison
so he can get behind the criminal organization. He's sentenced to five
years, and that old line between determination and stupidity instantly
vanishes. Nothing else in the movie matters after that, it becomes a
meaningless string of action sequences, most of which aren't even well
choreographed.
Oh, how about this, a helicopter crashes through the roof of "New
Alcatraz" at one point, accidentally freeing all of the inmates. And
what do they do? They all run out of their cells and play basketball in
the middle of the cell block. Without so much as a basket. They had a
ball, but it doesn't matter. The scene is so stupid they might as well
have been playing hopscotch.
So some guy is being sentenced to be the first person ever to be
executed in Alcatraz's state of the art execution chamber, evidently
not for stealing $200 million dollars in gold, but for not telling
where it was hidden once he was caught.
Hey, good thinking, people. If you can't get information out of
someone, kill them. That's a great way to learn the truth! So some gang
breaks into the prison planning to stop the execution and get the
location of the $200 million for themselves.
Oh and the $200 million is in gold bricks. I doubt they thought ahead
to how difficult it would be to turn that into exchangeable currency.
There's also the issue of the warden at the prison. He's some
tough-talking vato who thinks he's a hardcore chollo from the barrio,
which reminds me of a joke. I saw this comedian once talking about
people in California who talk all tough calling each other ese and
homes and all kinds of other such nonsense. These people go to Mexico,
the comedian says, and they're like, "Oh my god! People LIVE there?
That's like, a total shack!"
The best is when the United States Supreme Court Justice arrives and
this guy tells her that her men can't carry their guns inside his
prison, "I don't care if she IS a United States Supreme Court Justice!"
This woman could squish him like a grape and he thinks he's in charge.
Ha.
And by the way, the Supreme Court Justice that gets taken as a hostage
in the movie tells the bad guy that she is 53. That's a year younger
than Steven Seagal. I just thought that was funny.
The only good scene in the movie is the one in the prison where Ja Rule
is getting slapped around the prison like a sack of cotton balls by
this little Asian woman. That was the funniest thing I've seen in a
movie in a long, long time.
You know, I work for the company that produced this film (which I why I
watched it), and I still don't have a single positive thing to say
about it, except, of course, for that one scene with Ja Rule getting
spanked by that Asian woman.
So read my review of Malena and you will see how strongly I sometimes
disagree with professional film critics like Roger Ebert, but in his
review of this movie Ebert wrote something that I agreed with as much
as anything else he's ever written:
"I imagine the flywheels at the MPAA congratulating each other on a
good day's work as they rated 'Half Past Dead' PG-13, after giving the
anti-gun movie 'Bowling for Columbine' an R."
Way to go, guys.
Cast
- Nicolas 'Nick' Frazier played by Ja Rule
- Special Agent Ellen Williams played by Claudia Christian
- Little Joe played by Michael Taliferro
- Twitch played by Kurupt
- 49er One played by Morris Chestnut
- Sasha Petrosevitch played by Steven Seagal
- Warden El Fuego played by Tony Plana
