Grade: C-
Danny Boyle’s been in a bad slump ever since “Trainspotting” in 1996, and this apocalyptic horror flick doesn’t reverse the slide. “28 Days Later” is essentially a homage to George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” done on a much grander scale and with dumb scientific explanations rather than ambiguity at the center. Relentlessly grim and gruesome, it does what it sets out to do; the problem is that apparently what it wants isn’t so much to give us a pleasant scare as to disgust us. Adolescent boys and older guys with adolescent tastes might get a charge from that, but most others will understandably take a pass.
The script by Alex Garland does have a certain topicality in that it ascribes all the trouble to a virus, one that in this telling is released when thoughtless animal-rights activists invade a laboratory in England and free primates infected with a malady called called “Rage.” After showing us this event, the picture skips ahead a month or so, when Jim (Cillian Murphy), a coma victim, awakens in a deserted hospital. Stumbling outside, he finds London desolate and thick with trash; an old newspaper informs him that an evacuation had been ordered after the spread of a dreadful plague.
But Jim, as it turns out, is hardly alone. He’s soon attacked by a bunch of erstwhile humans transformed by the disease–not, unhappily, into green-skinned, purple-trousered little Hulks, but instead into blood-sucking, flesh-chomping ghouls. Jim is rescued by two vampire-hunters, Mark (Noah Huntley) and Selena (Naomie Harris), who fill him in on what’s happened during his sleep and reluctantly accompany him to his parents’ house; but there another attack occurs in which Mark is infected and Selena quickly disposes of him.
On the road again, the new duo fall in with Frank (Brendan Gleeson), an erstwhile taxi driver, and his daughter Hannah (Megan Burns), who’ve survived by blockading themselves in a high-rise flat. Frank persuades Jim and Selena to join them in an effort to drive to a place outside Manchester, where a military radio signal is being broadcast promising sanctuary. Along the way one of the group meets a horrible fate, but the others make it to a mansion-turned-fortress by Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston) and his small battalion of troops. Unfortunately, in a grisly twist, the supposed saviors turn out to be as brutal and dangerous as the rampaging hordes–if not more so.
You have to admire certain aspects of “28 Days Later.” The shots of the deserted London are as impressive as the ones you might recall from “On the Beach” or “The World, the Flesh and the Devil,” and Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, using high definition video transferred to 35mm, give the picture–until the bright, cheery finale, shot directly on film–a gritty, bleached-out look that mimics the on-the-fly black-and-white photography of Romero’s ultra-cheap classic. (Of course, the look probably cost a small fortune to achieve.)
But apart from the visuals, the movie doesn’t have a lot to praise. All the characters are flimsily drawn–the uninfected don’t have much more texture than the zombies–and for the most part they’re not fleshed out by the cast terribly well, either. Murphy is a cipher as the hero, and though Harris has greater energy, she never really connects; Eccleston’s cerebral, brooding villain could have been a chilling figure, but he comes across as simply misguided, and his men–one good, the others nearly bestial themselves–aren’t well differentiated. Gleeson brings his customary outsized persona to the likable cabbie, and takes the lead in the picture’s sole joyful interlude, when the travelers take a shopping spree in a grocery, but he’s not given enough to do, and while Burns thankfully resists trying to tug at the heartstrings overmuch, she’s too amateurish to build any emotional connection with the audience.
But far worse than the lack of characterization is the fact that in its grim determination to shock, the film is loaded with gore and violence–lots of blood-spewing and jaggedly-cut brutality–which, in this shallow context, all comes across as gratuitously gross and thoroughly unpleasant. It’s gory, but not in the least genuinely scary.
It’s easy to see trash like “House of 1,000 Corpses” or “Wrong Turn” for what it is, because it makes no claim to be anything more than nasty junk; it’s more difficult to perceive that a film like this, with false pretensions–like the previous Garland-Boyle collaboration “The Beach”–to being some sort of statement (even if it’s never made clear what it’s a statement about), is at pretty much the same level.
Probably the saddest thing about “28 Days Later” is that it takes itself so seriously although, except for the arty photography and more graphic violence, it really has no more dramatic heft than the silly potboilers John Carpenter has been churning out of late. If you want to watch a movie about a rampaging mob of vampires in London, a better choice is Tobe Hooper’s “Lifeforce” (1985). It’s a completely nutty movie, which tosses together a whole variety of genres–science fiction, horror flick and saving-the-world opus–into a single goofy scenario. But at least it keeps its tongue firmly in cheek and offers up the nonsense without apology. As dumb as it is, it’s weirdly amusing–which is much more than can be said for Boyle’s dark, gloomy, soulless exercise in human degradation.