“28 Days Later” (Fox Searchlight)
“28 Days Later” is a timely film in that it deals with a death delivering virus that sweeps across the country. The country in this case being England. It turns people into crazed zombie like creatures, and as far as anyone knows there is no cure. In this day of SARS and “monkeypox” a film such as this one could hit too close to home. That is if it had any touch of reality to it.
“28 Days Later” plays like a fantasy. A young man named Jim (Cillian Murphy) awakens from a coma like state. He has supposedly been asleep for something like twenty-eight days. For a man who has been in a coma he is remarkable fit. He gets out of bed and staggers out of the hospital. All the while he notices there is no one around.
Later he meets up with a girl named Selena (Naomie Harris) who tells him the world population has been virtually wiped out by a virus which was set free by animal activists freeing some monkeys which were being used for lab experiments. Monkeys! It is always the monkeys!
Eventually Jim and Selena meet up with a man (Brendan Gleason) and his daughter (Megan Burns). The four of them hear a radio broadcast from a military post and set out to find if there are other survivors. Along the way they have to escape from the “infecteds.”
The film is billed as a horror flick which it is anything but. There are no shocks and scares to perk things up. It is all predictable and for the most part boring. The fact it is filmed in grainy darkness doesn’t help either.
The acting is pretty much run of the mill and you never really get involved with any of the characters. Director Danny Boyle, of “Trainspotting” fame” does little to move the story or the action along. He just lets the events unspool and follow whatever course they may.
The film is rated R for profanity, nudity and violence.
There is a message in the movie about unbridled experimentation on animals but it is a weak one and doesn’t make much impact. The ending of the film doesn’t make any sense at all and seems just tacked on to tidy things up.
Boyle does have a trick or two up his sleeve and that saves the movie from being a total waste, but when these “surprises” occur it is too little too late. There needs to be more of them and much sooner in the film.
I scored “28 Days Later” a timely 4 out of 10.
