Donny’s most efficient bit of equipment is the magnificent Down Ass Bitch (Nia Peeples), whose overkilled eye shadow prompts an observant inmate to call her out: “Hey mama, got that blue stuff working, huh?” She’s got bondage gear, a huge gun, and a great haircut: she and Ja need to be making a music video.Īt any rate, Donny’s goal is to force a dead-man-walking, Lester (Bruce Weitz), to give up the location of $200 million in gold, before he’s executed (again, the logic seems strained: what is in it for this guy to give up anything, as he’s going to die either way?). And there’s lots of wind: their descent by parachutes is dramatically back-dropped by a stormy night, so stormy that their escape chopper crashes into the prison, so it hangs through the ceiling through the rest of the movie. There are reasons for this, involving Nick’s boss (Richard Bremmer), but you won’t care because another plot kicks in once everyone’s at New Alcatraz.Īnd that plot features a restless prison official, Donny (Morris Chestnut), who breaks into the prison with a SWAT-like team, wearing cool black coats that swirl spectacularly in the wind. And in the context of Half Past Dead, the legend makes Sascha, reassigned after hospital to go undercover as a New Alcatraz inmate, so he can make contact again with Nick. This impressive resurrected-guy legend corresponds, metaphorically of course, to Seagal’s own career, deemed quite dead not long ago, and resurrected when he made the DMX movie. (That said, the title doesn’t make sense: as he’s really halfway to death, rather than halfway past it, but… whatever.) A deeply undercover FBI agent, Sascha is shot up by feds who are actually shooting at Nick, during a bust gone bad Sascha then becomes legendary because he almost dies and comes back. A brief introductory sequence sets up the typically hysterical Seagal-film title, here concerning the near death of his character, Sascha (thus indicating that he is of “Russian” extraction). Just why it’s been re-opened is vague, but it has something to do with politicians and vicious capitalism, a potentially interesting theme to follow through, though the film doesn’t. The easiest way to imagine them all in the same place, apparently, is in a prison, and so, Half Past Dead is mostly set in a re-opened, Oz-ified Alcatraz. (He’s so effective that his closing-credits exchange with girlfriend Mo’Nique has found its way into commercials, suggesting that even though this scene - his longest - doesn’t show up in the film proper, Kurupt is on his way as a movie star.)īoth Ja Rule and Kurupt (“My favorite scenes were the shootings,” he says) prop up Seagal, no mean feat. The former plays another version of his tough-but-vulnerable character, a natty-dressing car thief named Nick the latter plays a skinny comedic third tier scene-stealer named Twitch. Here, Seagal and company multiply what has worked before, pairing him with not one, but two ragingly appealing hiphop artists: Ja and Kurupt. In Half Past Dead, Ja is partnered with Steven Seagal, the fading action/martial arts star who not only refuses to go away, but has recommenced his career by coming up with his very own marketing framework: the Steven-Seagal-with-rap-costar mini-genre, which includes the profitable Exit Wounds, with DMX, and the straight-to-video Ticker, with Nas. And yet, despite the fact that Ja only had about four minutes of screen time in that big-scary-hit of a movie, he was prominently featured in the trailers, meaning that someone in the PR department spotted his tremendous charisma and meant to exploit it. So far, he’s chosen material erratically: as the sidekick in Turn It Up, he blew the awkward Pras off the screen in The Fast and the Furious, he took a backseat to the booming Vin Diesel. Whether or not Ja’s genius for being in the right place at the right time will carry over to his embryonic film career remains to be seen. Lo, and Lil Mo to Charli Baltimore, Vita, and Ashanti, and most recently, the can’t-stay-out-of-his-own-way Bobby Brown) are consistently successful, not only profitable, but also shrewd mixes of R&B, hip-hop, and pop. Even more specifically, he plays very well with others: Ja Rule’s musical collaborations with a range of artists (from Mary, J. And while his own rap rhythms are distinctive, when the 26-year-old Ja turns his raspy vocals onto R&B hooks, he’s pretty much irresistible. Specifically, he can look thugged out and adorable, usually simultaneously and usually shirtless. Once heralded/dismissed as a second coming of Pac’s more agreeable side, Ja has showed over the years that he has his own skills.
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