28 Weeks Later

Robert Carlyle
Rose Byrne
Jeremy Renner
Harold Perrineau
Catherine McCormack
Imogen Poots
Mackintosh Muggleton

Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

It’s been 28 weeks (duh) since the outbreak of the infection that decimated Great Britain in the original film. Now, thanks to the U.S. military, the country is ready to start again and the first groups of refuges begin to pour into London. Don, one of the few survivors from the original outbreak, is reunited with his children and things seem perfect for a while. That is until a single infected individual finds their way into the quarantine zone and the chaos begins again.

Let it be said that I believe the first film, 28 Days Later is one of the best horror movies to come out in the past 10 years. It was original, moving, terrifying and hard-hitting. It’s also one of my favorite movies. So, to be fair, this sequel had a lot to live up to in my mind. And for the first thirty minutes or so I thought it actually might meet, and possibly exceed my expectations. The film begins strong, with a hell of a jaw-dropping opening that seemed to instantly define Robert Carlyle’s character and what type of film I was in for. I was hooked (despite the extreme overuse of the shaky camera technique which, at times, was so hard to follow they may as well have cut to a black screen with big white letters reading “Zombie Attack”) and fully convinced that this film would indeed live up to my expectations.

Unfortunately it went downhill from there, devolving from a smart and emotional thriller about survival in the worst of situations into a clichÈ-ridden, run-of-the-mill horror flick that made less sense the longer it went on. After a while I began to notice that every single plot-device in the film wasn’t so much well developed as it was handed to you on a silver platter, tied up with a nice little bow. There were way too many coincidences and events lining up just so the films story would continue to roll on, despite not making any logical sense whatsoever. And somewhere along the way, as the body-count rose, the emotion dropped and I found myself not really caring one way or the other if any of the pre-packaged corpses passing for three-dimensional characters lived or died.

Oh sure, this movie looked incredible. Half the time I was so enamored with the film’s style and awesome set pieces that I almost forgot that the story didn’t make any damn sense. Almost. Unlike the first film, which managed to combine amazing imagery with compelling storytelling, 28 Weeks Later became almost completely reliant upon the next cool explosion or spray of blood on the screen. While it may have looked almost as good as Danny Boyle’s original, it lacked all of the emotion, subtlety and sheer desperation of that film.

(As an aside, I was well and truly out on this movie when I noticed that one particular scene, present in the theatrical trailer for the film, had been cut from the movie altogether. Maybe that seems a little odd but truthfully it was that scene in the trailer that had sold me on this film in the first place. Maybe I’m just an angry guy.)

Okay, it’s not an awful film. It’s a standard studio-produced horror flick, which at times rises about the usually disappointing fare of the genre. But it’s not half the film it’s predecessor was. 28 Days Later was a moving tale of survival against the backdrop of an apocalyptic zombie movie. This film is the opposite, a kill-kill-kill monster movie with story and emotion added as an afterthought more than anything. So if you’re looking for something on the level of 28 Days Later you’re not going to find anything close to it in this movie. But if you’ve got a hankering for a horror film that’s slightly better than the average gore-fest then maybe 28 Weeks Later is the movie for you.

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