Okay, so I saw Half Past Dead last night, and I have a few comments and observations.
First of all, I have to agree with Roger Ebert:
"Seagal's great contribution to the movie is to look very serious, even menacing, in closeups carefully framed to hide his double chin. I do not object to the fact that he's put on weight....I object to the fact that he thinks he can conceal it from us with knee-length coats and tricky camera angles. I would rather see a movie about a pudgy karate fighter than a movie about a guy you never get a good look at."
While I don't think the movie is as complete a dog as Ebert thought it was in the rest of his review (does anyone want me to find the original text of the review and post it/link it to this site?), I think it could have been much better.
One thing I noticed particularly, is that while Steven gets the top billing, he's hardly in the film at all. The one who gets the most screen time - and some of the best scenes - is Morris Chestnut (he was good as the bad guy, but he could have been better).
Also, I found I was left a bit cold in the watching of the film, partly because I didn't engage with the characters. I think it's because the film didn't spend enough time getting to know the inmates so that we could care about them, and it spent 'way too much time on firefights that were static and uninteresting, particularly the last one (I mean, how many times did we need to see the door of the cell Twitch was hiding being shot out?).
The one characteristic of Steven's action films that distinguished them from others in the genre is that there was always time to get to know the characters, even if the scenes were small - like the baptism scene in Above the Law, or the scene (again in ATL) where Nico's auntie begs him to go find her daughter. We *cared* about the characters, because learned who they were through their actions.
In the "making of" docu on the DVD, it was clear that the director didn't think it was necessary to reveal anything at all about the characters in his film because, as he says himself, {paraphrase}"...as soon as you see Steven on the screen you know who he is." Ditto for the rest of the actors - they were all hired to appeal to just about every age/sex/marketing group, and while (surprisingly) the chemistry was good, there wasn't enough of it to make me care, for example, when Twitch's big friend got killed.
One scene filmed, but not on the deleted scenes list, was shown in the "making of" docu, and I think it would have been helpful to have included it. It was a scene shot in the cafeteria. A five minute scene like that where the audience would have got to know the individual inmates a little better would have gone a long way to giving the audience a little more to care about when something happened to these inmates. (I found it interesting, in fact, that, technically, the "good guys" were really a set of bad guys, and it would have been sheer genius - in the hands of a good director - to make the audience be sympathetic to a bunch of bad guys - think of "Oz", for example.)
The aerial fight - okay, it was done with a stuntman - but even then, all we see mostly is Chestnut. It wasn't very well choreographed at all.
I would have included two of the three scenes in the deleted scenes list - the 'shooting' scene, and the scene where Chestnut kills his boss. (However, I wouldn't have put the shooting scene at the beginning of the film - the introduction to Sascha worked quite well as it did. I would have put it right before Sascha tells Nick about his wife being shot.)
(And oh, by the way - okay, this is a general rant - but what IS it with Hollywood, they've always got to give old guys young wives barely out of puberty? Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, Robert Redford, and now our Steven, to name but a few, have all been paired with sweet young things in recent films. Come on, guys! Give middle-aged women a break, here! Okay, rant over.)
And me, I would have filmed Chestnut putting the judge into the chair, instead of going for the 'shock' value of the switching shot - Lester in the chair to Macpherson in the chair. It left me cold, didn't make me feel anything for Macpherson. A pity, too, because Macpherson was a strong female character, and, in my opinion, the equal and opposite of Nia Peeples' character, and that would have made a great contrast if we could have seen more of that.
Nia Peeples rocked in this film. She was having 'way to much fun.
And Ja Rule was really good as well. I love that scene where Nick and Sascha meet coming into the prison and they 'hug' (there's something you don't see every day in a Steven Seagal film). And the scene where Nick tries to teach Sascha to say "ayiiight" was hysterically funny. "You're whiter than I thought." <-T, laughing herself silly recalling this>
Anyhow, those are my thoughts on the film.
Discussion?
First of all, I have to agree with Roger Ebert:
"Seagal's great contribution to the movie is to look very serious, even menacing, in closeups carefully framed to hide his double chin. I do not object to the fact that he's put on weight....I object to the fact that he thinks he can conceal it from us with knee-length coats and tricky camera angles. I would rather see a movie about a pudgy karate fighter than a movie about a guy you never get a good look at."
While I don't think the movie is as complete a dog as Ebert thought it was in the rest of his review (does anyone want me to find the original text of the review and post it/link it to this site?), I think it could have been much better.
One thing I noticed particularly, is that while Steven gets the top billing, he's hardly in the film at all. The one who gets the most screen time - and some of the best scenes - is Morris Chestnut (he was good as the bad guy, but he could have been better).
Also, I found I was left a bit cold in the watching of the film, partly because I didn't engage with the characters. I think it's because the film didn't spend enough time getting to know the inmates so that we could care about them, and it spent 'way too much time on firefights that were static and uninteresting, particularly the last one (I mean, how many times did we need to see the door of the cell Twitch was hiding being shot out?).
The one characteristic of Steven's action films that distinguished them from others in the genre is that there was always time to get to know the characters, even if the scenes were small - like the baptism scene in Above the Law, or the scene (again in ATL) where Nico's auntie begs him to go find her daughter. We *cared* about the characters, because learned who they were through their actions.
In the "making of" docu on the DVD, it was clear that the director didn't think it was necessary to reveal anything at all about the characters in his film because, as he says himself, {paraphrase}"...as soon as you see Steven on the screen you know who he is." Ditto for the rest of the actors - they were all hired to appeal to just about every age/sex/marketing group, and while (surprisingly) the chemistry was good, there wasn't enough of it to make me care, for example, when Twitch's big friend got killed.
One scene filmed, but not on the deleted scenes list, was shown in the "making of" docu, and I think it would have been helpful to have included it. It was a scene shot in the cafeteria. A five minute scene like that where the audience would have got to know the individual inmates a little better would have gone a long way to giving the audience a little more to care about when something happened to these inmates. (I found it interesting, in fact, that, technically, the "good guys" were really a set of bad guys, and it would have been sheer genius - in the hands of a good director - to make the audience be sympathetic to a bunch of bad guys - think of "Oz", for example.)
The aerial fight - okay, it was done with a stuntman - but even then, all we see mostly is Chestnut. It wasn't very well choreographed at all.
I would have included two of the three scenes in the deleted scenes list - the 'shooting' scene, and the scene where Chestnut kills his boss. (However, I wouldn't have put the shooting scene at the beginning of the film - the introduction to Sascha worked quite well as it did. I would have put it right before Sascha tells Nick about his wife being shot.)
(And oh, by the way - okay, this is a general rant - but what IS it with Hollywood, they've always got to give old guys young wives barely out of puberty? Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, Robert Redford, and now our Steven, to name but a few, have all been paired with sweet young things in recent films. Come on, guys! Give middle-aged women a break, here! Okay, rant over.)
And me, I would have filmed Chestnut putting the judge into the chair, instead of going for the 'shock' value of the switching shot - Lester in the chair to Macpherson in the chair. It left me cold, didn't make me feel anything for Macpherson. A pity, too, because Macpherson was a strong female character, and, in my opinion, the equal and opposite of Nia Peeples' character, and that would have made a great contrast if we could have seen more of that.
Nia Peeples rocked in this film. She was having 'way to much fun.
And Ja Rule was really good as well. I love that scene where Nick and Sascha meet coming into the prison and they 'hug' (there's something you don't see every day in a Steven Seagal film). And the scene where Nick tries to teach Sascha to say "ayiiight" was hysterically funny. "You're whiter than I thought." <-T, laughing herself silly recalling this>
Anyhow, those are my thoughts on the film.
Discussion?
