Half Past Dead

Half Past Dead is a 2002 American action film written and directed by Don Michael Paul in his directorial debut, and produced by Steven Seagal, who also starred in the lead role, alongside Andrew Stevens and Elie Samaha. The film co-stars Morris Chestnut, Ja Rule, Tony Plana, Kurupt, and Nia Peeples. The film tells the story of a criminal who infiltrates a prison to interrogate a prisoner about the location of a fortune in gold while an undercover FBI agent has to stop him. Distribution and copyrights were held by Columbia Pictures. Half Past Dead was released on November 15, 2002, by Screen Gems. The film grossed $19 million worldwide against its budget of $25 million. Plot In San Francisco, FBI agent Sasha Petrosevitch (Steven Seagal) goes undercover as a Russian car thief and is brought in by criminal Nick Frazier (Ja Rule) to work for crime boss Sonny Eckvall (Richard Bremmer), who apparently shot and killed Sasha's wife. After some time, FBI Special Agent Ellen Williams (Claudia Christian) and her team show up to nail Nick, but things go wrong, and Sasha gets shot. After eight months of recovery following his brief bout of being clinically dead from the shooting, Sasha is incarcerated along with Nick in the newly reopened Alcatraz prison. Run by the charismatic warden, Juan Ruiz "El Fuego" Escarzaga (Tony Plana), the place is known for its new state of the art death chamber where the condemned can choose from five different ways to die: lethal injection, gas chamber, hanging, firing squad, or electric chair. Lester McKenna (Bruce Weitz) is the first death row prisoner brought to the new Alcatraz and also the first prisoner scheduled to be executed. An older man, he stole $200,000,000 worth of gold bricks in a heist that resulted in five deaths and hid the loot at an unknown location. Federal Bureau of Prisons head Frank Hubbard (Stephen J. Cannell) and Supreme Court Justice Jane McPherson (Linda Thorson) have arrived to witness the execution, which is a result of Jane sentencing Lester.