A Sickly Sequel
Wednesday May 16 12:53 PM ET
With 28 Weeks Later, the Brits prove that it's not just Hollywood that has the temerity to revisit a film that didn't need to be revisited.
By Brent Simon, FilmStew.com
In 2003, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later helped put a new, rabidly charged spin on the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, telling the story of an English coma patient (Cillian Murphy) who awakens to find what on the surface appears to be an eerily empty London in fact overrun by victims of a "rage virus." Shot in gritty fashion on digital video for only $8 million, the film was a tremendous summer success for distributor Fox Searchlight, which used a canny grassroots marketing plan and drew upon bubbling, post-September 11 world anxiety to evoke dreadful parallel delight (unspeakable violence delivered with an unnerving fervor). In the end, the film scared up $45 million domestically and another $37.5 million overseas.
Opening at 1,100 more venues than its predecessor, 28 Weeks Later pulled in $10 million this past weekend, just under the 2003 film, but on par with zombie maestro George Romero's 2005 entry Land of the Dead, and good for second place at the box office behind Spider-Man 3's sophomore frame. The movie's creative execution, though, represents a headlong plunge off the first film's fairly reasoned cliff, and may jeopardize future franchise viability if justifiably sour word-of-mouth proves as contagious as the movie's viral plague.
Proffering quite literally only a small handful of evocative shots and momentary, impressionistic tones and moods, 28 Weeks Later is a disappointment both as a narrative continuation of 28 Days Later and merely as its own stand-alone thrill ride. Its putative emotional centerpiece — a sequence involving a mass escape which turns into a military shooting gallery — is a piece of cheap, empty theater, exacerbated by illogical staging. The film is marked by certain political allusions — talk of re-populated "green zones" and the like, all patrolled by American-led armed NATO forces — but does little to interweave these into the story in a significant and meaningful way.
28 Weeks Later opens on a working-class British couple, Don (Robert Carlyle) and Alice Harris (Catherine McCormack), holed up in a rural cottage with a handful of other survivors. When security is breached, Don opts for self-preservation and flees in somewhat cowardly fashion, believing his wife to have been unable to be saved. Nearly six months later, the plague has apparently run its course, and society is being cautiously reproduced. Don is reunited with his two kids — teenager Tammy (Imogen Poots) and the younger Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton), sent away abroad for safe-keeping prior to the outbreak — and talks around Alice's death a bit.
Desiring some keepsake or memento of their mother, Tammy and Andy slip out of the contained area and return to their house, where they come across a strung-out Alice, who is infected with the rage virus but possessing of a special genetic immunity that suppresses its effects. Medical official Scarlet (Rose Byrne) examines Alice and immediately ascertains her importance in possibly creating a vaccine that will reverse the virus, but Don slips in past security and makes a weepy apology to his wife.
When they swap saliva, he becomes infected, and thus the rampaging virus is off and running again. Tammy and Andy escape containment with Scarlet, and this trio eventually joins up with Army sniper Doyle (Jeremy Renner), whose hesitancy over cruelly but necessarily gunning down fleeing masses in wholesale fashion gives way to a new resolve when he's told that Andy likely has the same genetic makeup that could drive research for a cure.
28 Weeks Later is directed by Spaniard Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Intacto), whose execution doesn't measure up to the script's few scenes of imagination. These include a motorboat escape that partially opens the movie, a willfully implausible helicopter-as-weapon bit also seen in Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse segment and another episode of flight in which the chased party must avoid a deadly nerve gas being used to quell an uprising of the infected.
The very best that can be said of 28 Weeks Later is that it grabs hold of a frenetic pace and doesn't let go, but Fresnadillo utilizes too many cuts in his editing scheme — a contrivance that extends even to a simple scooter ride — and the movie is a bungled mess of misinformed plot strands and poorly delineated spatial relationships. The film's action scenes often literally make no sense, and so they become merely wearying instead of tension- or anxiety-provoking.
On the plus side, composer John Murphy's synth-driven score conveys a lilting sense of emo-doom. It clings to you, even if nothing else about 28 Weeks Later does.
http://movies.yahoo.com/mv/news/fs/20070516/117934518000.html
