28 Days Later - 2002
Directed by - Danny Boyle
Written by - Alex Garland

Starring:
Cillian Murphy - Jim
Naomie Harris - Selena
Brendan Gleeson - Frank
Megan Burns - Hannah
Christopher Eccleston - Maj. Henry West

hen activists break into a lab to free the animals from their cages, they unwittingly release a virus known as "rage." 28 days later, Jim, a bicycle messenger who was nearly killed in a traffic accident, gets out of his hospital bed and finds the hospital to be completely abandoned. Calling out for someone, anyone, he goes outside to a London that has turned into a ghost town. The shots of the empty city are astonishing, and a little disturbing. They are, in fact, the best thing about the whole movie.

Even after it becomes obvious that London is, or appears to be, empty, Jim continues to wander around shouting for someone else, looking like he was just hit in the back of the head with a shovel, an expression he maintains throughout the movie. Jim's a little slow on the uptake. He meets up with Selena and Mark, two people who have avoided infection. They explain to him that, once someone is infected with the "rage" virus, you have about twenty seconds to kill that person before he/she turns into a crazed, murderous, red-eyed lunatic. Selena, a tough, no-nonsense woman and the most interesting character in the movie, says the virus has spread to America and France.

But how? If the virus turns its victims into raging monsters in twenty seconds, how could it possibly spread to the U.S. and France? With virtually no incubation period, people would become symptomatic before they could travel to other countries. But logic does not play a big part in this movie.

They meet a cab driver named Frank and his teenage daughter Hannah, who are holed up in a high-rise apartment. On the radio, they listen to a broadcast from an Army unit occupying what is described as a safe zone near Manchester. They decide to go there in Frank's cab, which, in a ludicrous scene, is somehow able to drive over all the cars jammed in a tunnel. When they arrive at the safe zone, they eventually find the soldiers to be almost as threatening as the raging monsters who travel in packs and, for reasons unexplained, attack everyone but each other.

Maybe the enthusiastic buzz about 28 Days Later got my hopes a little too high. Maybe all the talk about Danny Boyle reinventing the zombie movie raised my expectations. Boyle is an accomplished director whose films include Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, which makes 28 Days Later even more disappointing, as well as puzzling.

First of all, anyone who says this is a zombie movie has never seen a zombie movie before. Zombies are dead. The roving packs of infected people in this movie are not dead, they're simply infected and insane with rage. Zombies eat the living. The infected here only want to kill. In order to stop a zombie, you must destroy the brain. To stop the infected in 28 Days Later, all you have to do is kill them. This is most definitely not a zombie movie.

The cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle is so dark and murky, it often looks as if it were filmed through a dirty lens. The scenes in which the infected attack are so jumbled and jumpy, they appear to have been shot by someone in the advance stages of Parkinson's disease.

Alex Garland's screenplay has no surprises. Sometimes it's predictable enough to be boring.

I wanted very much to like 28 Days Later. I went in with high hopes, planning to have a good time. Halfway through the movie, I was baffled by the praise it had received and annoyed that I'd fallen for it. It's mediocre at best.

Starting July 25, a darker alternate ending will be tacked onto the movie after the closing credits. I don't know what that ending is, but I know it won't be enough to save this movie.

Instead of going out to see 28 Days Later, I recommend staying home and renting Shallow Grave or Trainspotting, two gripping movies by Boyle that are so good, they hold up after multiple viewings. If you've never seen them before, then you're in for a good time. If you have, seeing them again would be much better than sitting through this tedious, frustrating movie.

1/2

NOTE: In my last column, I reviewed Wilder Napalm, and pointed out that it's a very difficult movie to find. That won't be the case much longer. I'm happy to report that Wilder Napalm will be coming to DVD Sept. 9, 2003. Watch it!

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