28 Weeks Later

(Cert 18)
2 out of 5 2
28 Weeks Later
Dead boring... 28 Weeks Later

Four years ago, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland had a huge, bloodthirsty, flesh-ripping, eyeball-gouging hit on their hands with 28 Days Later: a post-apocalyptic vision of Britain reduced to anarchy with the leak of a dangerous virus called "rage", reducing one and all to ferocious zombies. It was entertaining genre stuff. Here is the disappointing sequel, on which Boyle and Garland serve as executive producers. They have entrusted it to the talented Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (who made the hit metaphysical thriller Intacto) and a whole kitchen-full of cooks in the writing department. I can only say that after a terrific beginning, the movie's credibility snaps like a frozen twig with one stupid plot-glitch around 30 minutes in and then, despite some spectacular moments, fails to disguise the fact that there isn't much mileage left in all those red-eyed folk running around growling and gibbering and chomping.

  1. 28 Weeks Later
  2. Production year: 2007
  3. Country: UK
  4. Cert (UK): 18
  5. Runtime: 100 mins
  6. Directors: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
  7. Cast: Catherine McCormack, Harold Perrineau Jr., Harrold Perrineau, Jeremy Renner, Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne
  8. More on this film

What a cracking start it is, though. Robert Carlyle and Catherine McCormack are Don and Alice, a terrified couple, glimpsed first at the initial movie's 28-day mark. As good fortune would have it, they had packed their two kids off to the safety of a foreign holiday before the great catastrophe began; now they're in fear of their own lives, hiding out with a middle-aged couple in an idyllic country cottage transformed into a classically horrible Straw Dogs location, on account of the marauding anthro-vermin. Some shotguns might have helped here.

A terrible encounter and a terrible betrayal leave Carlyle consumed with anguish, and 28 weeks later he is awaiting his children in the un-brave new world of post-apocalypse Britain. The septic isle is now a fully-fledged US protectorate: the American army has expunged all infected carriers and it polices Britain as a quarantine-state with one reasonably safe zone: London's Isle of Dogs, whose sleek glass towers have been pressed into service as Ballardian refuge colonies for those traumatised souls who survived the plague. It is here that Don awaits the return of his teenage children from a French holding camp. They are Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) and Tammy (Imogen Poots), who promptly escape from the compound and brave the badlands of mouldering corpses and upended cars to find their family home in a deserted north London terrace, in search of some mementos of their beloved mother. It is here that they make a horrifying discovery.

In the hands of production designer Mark Tildesley and cinematographer Enrique Chediak, the movie looks wonderful, and London especially is captivating. Its deserted streets are rich and eerie and strange, like something from another planet. Even a straightforward shot of a commercial airliner coming in to land at London City airport, gleaming and flashing in the early morning sun, looks sensational. The Americans themselves are guarded and suspicious of their new-found contaminated subject peoples. Here the film speaks eloquently of America's post-7/7 suspicion and profound lack of sympathy for Britain and the dangerous spores and germs being incubated on our island.

Everything, in fact, is set fair for a tremendous film. But then all its hard-won authenticity and interest are blown when we are asked to believe that Don, a civilian caretaker in one of the requisitioned buildings, can use his swipecard to gain secret access to a heavily guarded military prisoner - and exchange bodily fluids with her. From then on, motivation and narrative-interest join hands on a high window-ledge and jump off. A beautiful military scientist (Rose Byrne) finds herself outside the compound with the two kids and a tough-guy American soldier (Jeremy Renner) decides to disobey orders and help them on a whim, having seen the heartbreakingly vulnerable kid through his crosshair sights - yeah, right.

It's such a fine line between the rage-filled neo-zombies looking scary and looking ridiculous. There are no gradations of lesser scariness, except for the one under looking ridiculous - looking boring. When people are infected, moreover, they turn instantly into slavering beasts, thus impatiently abolishing that dramatically invaluable interval, in which the infectee knows that there is no escape, and must either kill himself or beg others to do away with him. When the rage-monsters attack, their orgies of group violence and fear are shot with frenetic, almost stroboscopic flashiness, and at first this is effective. But then a question dawns: is it being cut like this so we don't get a cold, hard look at two dozen gurning extras on 40 quid a day with ketchup all over their faces?

Alfonso Cuarón managed to convey a superb vision of Britain in the futurist nightmare Children of Men by counterpointing the general situation with intimate, believable dramatic tensions within a small group of people. There is nothing like that here: only crowds of zombies and refugees charging tiresomely about the British landscape, covering huge distances on foot - and quite simply it is often very boring. I particularly felt that the considerable potential of Imogen Poots as Don's teenage daughter was not being effectively used.

The way is left open for more movies in a lucrative franchise: 52 Weeks Later, 104 Weeks Later, or maybe Nine 1/2 Weeks Later, the porn version with Kim Basinger, or Alan Weeks Later, in which the eyes of a well-loved sports commentator turn red and he gets the human-flesh-munchies. The idea could lumber on for some time to come.

Today's best video

Latest reviews

  • Ellar Coltrane and Ethan Hawke in Boyhood

    Boyhood review – one of the great films of the decade

    5 out of 5


Today in pictures