The house shelters, at various times, the mother of one of the characters, who spends most of her time in bed or staring vacantly into space, and a young couple who move in, and a real estate agent who sees that the bathtub is filled up and sticks his hand into the water to pull the plug, and is attacked by a woman with long hair who leaps out of the water. This woman’s hair, which sometimes looks like seaweed, appears in many scenes, hanging down into the frame as if it dreams of becoming a boom mike.
Various cops and social workers enter the house, some never to emerge, but the news of its malevolence doesn’t get around. You’d think that after a house has been associated with gruesome calamities on a daily basis, the neighbors could at least post an old-timer outside to opine that some mighty strange things have been a-happening in there.
I eventually lost all patience. The movie may have some subterranean level on which the story strands connect and make sense, but it eluded me. The fragmented time structure is a nuisance, not a style. The house is not particularly creepy from an architectural point of view, and if it didn’t have a crawl space under the eaves, the ghosts would have to jump out from behind sofas.
Sarah Michelle Gellar, the nominal star, has been in her share of horror movies, and all by herself could have written and directed a better one than this. As for Bill Pullman, the more I think about his opening scene, the more I think it represents his state of mind after he signed up for the movie, flew all the way to Japan, and read the screenplay.
H
Half Past Dead
(DIRECTED BY DON MICHAEL PAUL; STARRING STEVEN SEAGAL, MORRIS CHESTNUT; 2002)
Half Past Dead is like an alarm that goes off while nobody is in the room. It does its job and stops, and nobody cares. It goes through the motions of an action thriller, but there is a deadness at its center, a feeling that no one connected with it loved what they were doing. There are moments, to be sure, when Ja Rule and Morris Chestnut seem to hear the music, but they’re dancing by themselves.
The plot is preposterous, but that’s acceptable with a thriller. The action is preposterous, too: Various characters leap from high places while firing guns, and the movie doesn’t think to show us how, or if, they land. A room is filled with tear gas, but what exactly happens then? The movie takes the form of a buddy movie, but is stopped in its tracks because its hero, played by Steven Seagal, doesn’t have a buddy gene in his body. (I know, he takes seven bullets for his partner Nick, but I don’t think he planned it: “I’ll take seven bullets for Nick!”)
Seagal’s great contribution to the movie is to look very serious, even menacing, in close-ups carefully framed to hide his double chin. I do not object to the fact that he’s put on weight. Look who’s talking. 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.
The film has little dialogue and much action. It places its trust so firmly in action that it opens with a scene where the characters have one of those urban chase scenes where the car barely misses trailer trucks, squeals through 180-degree turns, etc., and they’re not even being chased. It’s kind of a warm-up, like a musician practicing the scales.
Do not read further if you think the plot may have the slightest importance to the movie. Seagal plays an undercover FBI guy who has teamed up with the crook Nick Frazier (Ja Rule), who vouched for him with the master criminal Sonny Ekvall (Richard Bremmer), who runs, if I have this correct, “the biggest crime syndicate between Eastern Europe and the Pacific Rim.” He doesn’t say whether the syndicate extends easterly or westerly between those demarcations, which would affect the rim he has in mind. Maybe easterly, since Seagal’s character is named Sascha Petrosevitch. “You’re Russian, right?” he asks Seagal, who agrees. Seagal’s answer to this question is the only time in the entire movie he has a Russian accent.
Nick gets thrown into New Alcatraz. Sascha Petrosevitch gets thrown in, too. Later, after his cover is blown, he explains to Nick that the FBI thought if he did time with Nick, it would help him get inside the criminal organization. The sentence is five years. What a guy.
Then, let’s see, the prison contains an old man who is about to go to the chair with the secret of $200 million in gold bars. Bad guys want his secret and cooperate with an insider (Morris Chestnut) to break into the prison, taking hostage a female U.S. Supreme Court justice who is on a tour of death row (she’s one of those liberals). They want to escape with the old guy and get the gold. Among their demands: a fully fueled jet plane to an “undisclosed location.” My advice: At least disclose the location to the pilot.
Nick and Sascha Petrosevitch team up to risk their lives in a nonstop series of shoot-outs, explosions, martial arts fights, and shoulder-launched rocket battles in order to save the Supreme Court justice. We know why Sascha Petrosevitch is doing this. But why is Nick? Apparently he is another example of that mysterious subset of the law of gravitation that attracts the black actor with second billing in an action movie to the side of the hero.
At the end of Half Past Dead there is a scene where Nick looks significantly at Sascha Petrosevitch and nods and smiles a little, as if to say, you some kinda white guy. Of course, Sascha Petrosevitch has just promised to spring him from New Alcatraz, which can easily inspire a nod and a little smile.
Meanwhile, I started wondering about that $200 million in gold. At the end of the movie, we see a chest being winched to the surface and some gold bars spilling out. If gold sells at, say, $321 per troy ounce, then $200 million in gold bars would represent 623,052 troy ounces, or 42,720 pounds, and would not fit in that chest. You would expect the FBI guys would know this. Maybe not these FBI guys.
Note: 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.
Head Over Heels
(DIRECTED BY MARK S. WATERS; STARRING MONICA POTTER, FREDDIE PRINZE JR; 2001)
Head Over Heels opens with fifteen funny minutes and then goes dead in the water. It’s like they sent home the first team of screenwriters and brought in Beavis and Butthead. The movie starts out with sharp wit and edgy zingers, switches them off, and turns to bathroom humor. And not funny bathroom humor, but painfully phony gas-passing noises, followed by a plumbing emergency that buries three supermodels in a putrid delivery from where the sun don’t shine. It’s as if the production was a fight to the death between bright people with a sense of humor and cretins who think the audience is as stupid as they are.
Monica Potter and Freddie Prinze Jr. star, in another one of those stories where it’s love at first sight and then she gets the notion that he’s clubbed someone to death. The two characters were doing perfectly well being funny as themselves, and then the movie muzzles them and brings in this pea-brained autopilot plot involving mistaken identities, dead bodies, and the Russian Mafia.