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. The film has little dialogue and much action. I would rather see a movie about a pudgy karate fighter than a movie about a guy you never get a good look at. I object to the fact that he thinks he can conceal it from us with knee-length coats and tricky camera angles. I do not object to the fact that he's put on weight. (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 closeups carefully framed to hide his double chin. A room is filled with teargas, 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. 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 landed. The plot is preposterous, but that's acceptable with a thriller. There are moments, to be sure, when Ja Rule and Morris Chestnut seem to hear the music, but they're dancing by themselves. 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. It does its job and stops, and nobody cares. Hate to say it, but to me nothing works in 'Contract to Kill' and it is an awful mess in every way."Half Past Dead" is like an alarm that goes off while nobody is in the room. 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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