“Half Past Dead” stars Steven Seagal (“Under Siege”, “Above The Law”) and like a lot of his films, it treads where many films have trod before it. It’s a combination of “The Rock”, “The Fast and the Furious” and about a dozen other pictures; it’s so laughably clichéd.

In “Half Past Dead”, Seagal stars as an undercover F.B.I. guy named Sasha. He’s inside New Alcatraz, a high-tech prison, which finds itself taken over by bad guys and he’s got to fight his way to save the day. There’s pretty much every late 1990s and early 2000s action movie cliché known to man as Seagal makes his way through the prison.

Seagal looks too overweight and too depressed to be a successful action hero; I’ve never really cared for him. By far the most impressive character is a henchwoman played by Nia Peebles, who flips and kicks and shoots the hell out of just about everybody. The villains and the other characters aren’t remotely exciting and that’s the film’s biggest flaw. Many of them are played by rappers such as Ja Rule (“Scary Movie 3”) and they’re really annoying in my opinion. Seagal and Ja Rule are supposedly buddies in this picture but there is zero chemistry.

The characters are bad, the story is convoluted but the action is pretty entertaining. I can’t recommend this film but if the weather is terrible, nobody else is around and this is on tv, watch it and I think you might get a few laughs out of the hilarious action sequences with people kicking in every direction possible and guns firing everywhere but the target (the skydiving is pretty funny as well). It’s most certainly an over the top film but it goes where so many other films have gone and the characters are abysmal.