Maybe its because I'm a Londoner...

Rating: 7/10 (12 May 2007)

Those who live in it have always known it to be so, but now it's official, that is to say - enshrined on celluloid; London is a hard place to live. Still at least in the world of 28 weeks later you aren't forced to share a tiny space with millions of bad tempered, brain dead, herd minded lunatics, always in a hurry to get everywhere. You'd think a situation like that would be ripe for satire but...
Then there's the tube. Everyone knows its a dank, cattle transport system where people would step over you rather than give you room to move. A repository of the living dead. Bags of social comment there. But again...
With the war in Iraq now entering its 349th year with 3 trillion people dead and the landscape reduced to a bombed husk; murderous, blood thirsty insurgents bleeding out of every damaged building, public space and cranny, the presence of American solders attempting to police and reconstruct a decimated Britain would the perfect plot device to carpet bomb an audience with allegorical abstraction but no, not a bit of it.
All of which is as true as the notion you can contain a monkey-based zombie emulating virus. 28 weeks later starts 28 weeks ago with Robert Caryle, later just slightly less insane than he was as Begbie in Trainspotting, leaving wife Catherine McCormack to be ravaged by some human rape bombs. He's later reunited with his kids and interned in the Isle of Dogs, perhaps the only scenario which might make you long to be back amongst the infected, vomiting blood. Her kids want a picture of Mum though, bless 'em, and improbably escape the blockade, returning to their house where McCormack is discovered alive, infected but curiously not that angry. She alone it seems has partial immunity to the virus and is brought back to the Dogs with predictably horrific results.
Despite having much more money at his disposal, at least enough to put film in his camera, Juan Carlos Fernsadillo, taking over from Danny Boyle, still manages to retain the lo-fi grainy bleakness of the original film. He alternates between lavish aerial shots of a deserted London and frenetic, hand-held close up horror - upping the ante in terms of both gore and gun play - the introduction of the army providing much scope for the infected getting chunks blown out of them by trigger happy snipers. For all that, its a less human film than it's predecessor, perhaps because the one character with the most interesting moral conundrum - Caryle, is dispatched before he's had a chance to really face up to his actions (though getting a dose from the wife is pretty bad but does vindicate his decision to initially run for it). Following his descent into blood lust, Begbie - sorry, Don - improbably chases his children across most of London, bumping into them enough times to suggest that all the statistics about kids being most likely to be killed by their genetic forebears are spot on. If that wasn't enough, a line from Juan's own screenplay inadvertently undoes the entire first film, suggesting he may missed the first five minutes of it, when we learn that that the virus doesn't travel between species. I know we're close to apes and I'm no zoologist but they're still not quite humans are they? Still its good news for the Irish.
Still Juan makes good use of his locations and the momentum is with the film, driving it forward to its lip curling conclusion in which another nation looks to pay the price for its decision to elect a right wing charlatan with designs on dismantling the country's well preserved social model.
Yes, 28 jours plus tard should be a lot of fun.