Half Past Dead

Half Past Dead is an action thriller set in a reopened Alcatraz, now a high-tech federal prison. An undercover FBI agent, Sasha Petrosevitch, is incarcerated there as part of an operation aimed at a death-row inmate who knows where a fortune in stolen gold is hidden. Before the agent can get what he needs, a heavily armed group seizes the island, also wanting the location of the gold, and he has to organize the inmates to resist them.

The film was directed by Don Michael Paul, who also wrote the screenplay, and it is the first of the fifteen films he has directed to date, followed by Who's Your Caddy? in 2007. Steven Seagal, who also served as a producer, plays Petrosevitch, with Morris Chestnut as the leader of the invaders, Ja Rule as a fellow inmate, and Nia Peeples, Alexandra Kamp and Claudia Christian in supporting roles.

Released in November 2002 and made for about 25 million dollars, the film took in roughly 19 million worldwide. Reception was weak across the board: it holds a critics' rating of 3.2 out of 10 from 88 reviews, an IMDb score of 4.6 from around 18,000 votes, and a TMDB rating of 5.1 from roughly 400 votes, so audiences rated it somewhat higher than critics did.