IT'S been more than two years since Steven Seagal graced our cinema screens in the overblown action thriller Exit Wounds. I had silently hoped that his films might never darken the doors of our blessed multiplexes ever again, detouring straight to the bottom shelves of video stores.

Sadly, the 52-year-old martial arts master is back in Don Michael Paul's lumbering thriller-by-numbers.

Seagal's trademark ponytail may be gone (concealed beneath a bandana), but Half Past Dead delivers everything you'd expect - slickly edited hand-to-hand combat, slow motion explosions and Seagal's lifeless delivery of one-liners whenever he despatches a bad guy.

FBI agent Sascha Petrosevitch (Seagal) and criminal Nick Frazier (Ja Rule) are sentenced to five years in New Alcatraz after an undercover op to infiltrate the inner circle of Sonny Ekvall (Richard Bremmer) goes sour.

Behind bars, the two men meet aged prisoner Lester (Bruce Weitz) who claims to know the whereabouts of $200 million in gold bullion - a secret he intends to take to the electric chair.

But not before opportunist crook Donny (Morris Chestnut), aka 49erOne, and his henchmen break into the prison, taking the old man and a visiting female US Supreme Court Justice (June McPherson) hostage.

Despite the obvious risks, Sascha and Nick join forces once more to disarm the bad guys and prevent them learning the whereabouts of the bullion.

Half Past Dead - a state of being likely to be suffered by anyone who sits through the film - is loud, brash and crudely thrown together by a writer-director who labours under the illusion that big pyrotechnics maketh the film.

The stunts are uninspired and only one action set-piece (the crash-landing of a helicopter into the roof of the jail) shows any imagination.

A coherent plot, characterisation and plausible dialogue simply don't get a look in.

Seagal loses his cod-Russian accent within the first film minutes and forms a lukewarm screen partnership with Ja Rule.

Chestnut snarls as the villain of the piece, accompanied by Nia Peeple's gun-slinging bad girl who claims to be attracted to danger. How she ended up in Half Past Dead is anyone's guess, then.

Rating: 2/10