![]() ![]() The BBC will use the information you provide, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites Once upon a time Seagal's fighting made him look pretty deadly. Seagal gets one good fight sequence - using his hands since the rest of him is so out of shape - leaving Ja Rule to fight most of the battles while schooling the porky martial artist in some ghetto speak. When a terrorist group storms the hi-tech fortress to break out the first convict scheduled to be executed there, Sascha goes into "Under-Siege"-meets-"Die-Hard" mode and takes them on with the help of Rule and the rest of the prison's inmates. Trying to track down the crime lord responsible for the death of his wife, Sascha befriends Rule's gangsta, Nick, and serves time with him in a newly reopened Alcatraz prison. Trawling for that golden demographic which'll keep him off the straight-to-video slide a little longer, "Half Past Dead" sees Seagal copying the limited success of the "Exit Wounds" formula by hanging with the homies and drafting in rapper Ja Rule for some gunplay. This is as dreary an 'action' film as any Seagal has put his name to (well, maybe not his environmental message movie "On Deadly Ground"). After being shot by the cops, Sascha (Seagal) flatlines, sees the tunnel and the white light, but decides to spurn heaven to come back to kick some more butt. "Half Past Dead" is the name dreamt up for Seagal's near-death experience in the first reel of the movie. What exactly does it promise? A movie about a time bomb? A terrorist strike? A killer clockmaker? Hate to say it, but to me nothing works in 'Contract to Kill' and it is an awful mess in every way.As movie titles go, the clunking moniker of Steven Seagal's latest attempt to convince the world he's still an action man is pretty pathetic. And it's not just the editing, the slapdash special effects, drab photography and laughably bad green screen (that was too obvious and jarring) are just as bad. Direction is flat and ill-at ease, while the sound/soundtrack are one-note and obvious as well as poorly recorded and the whole film looks cheap. The story is by-the-numbers, dull and not always easy to follow. ![]() The action doesn't feature enough in comparison and suffer from pedestrian choreography and bacon-slicer-like editing. There is no urgency, let alone tension, intrigue or suspense. Its excessively talky nature affects severely the pacing, which never comes to life. The dialogue is risible, with a lot of cheesiness, awkwardness and far too much talk delivered with little emotion or momentum and bordering on the near-incomprehensible. The characters are ones we know very little about and don't care what happens to happen, so unengaging and one-dimensional they are. The rest of the cast are just as poor though in all fairness have little to work with. His reading-from-an-autocue-like and robotic line delivery in particular betrays that. Seagal himself gives another lazy and wooden performance that shows that he was not interested and wanted to be somewhere else. 'Contract to Kill' is far from that, more closer to a waste of time that shows little signs of trying. ![]() Also do appreciate the action genre and there are good films out there in the genre, classics even. Did not expect much, but watched it because Seagal has shown signs that he can be halfway decent and as said not all his films are bad. Awful even, and for me if ranking Seagal's filmography from best to worst it would be towards the bottom. 'Contract to Kill' is one of the very bad ones. ![]() He has also done a lot of mediocre and less films, indicative of laziness and that Seagal was well past his sell by date, and a good deal of them are even very bad. Steven Seagal has done some good, or at least watchable, films. ![]()
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