narrative lacks focus, but still worth seeing at the theater

Rating: 8/10 (7 June 2007)

I really enjoyed 28 DAYS LATER and in general I'm a huge fan of the apocalyptic it's-the-end-of-the-world genre.
The first 20 minutes of 28 WEEKS LATER had me hooked, but after the story moves to the Green Zone in London, with the family split up, the narrative loses focus and the film suffers for this.
And the goal of the kids traveling with the American sniper and medic left me with a big "so what?" - so they need to get to the stadium - why? What's the point? Escape from the city? What about the rest of the American military personnel? Did they all leave? (None of this is explained).
The ending also felt tacked on -- I really expected that the last third of the film had started when they took off from Wembley Stadium. The film must have tested so well that Fox wanted the opportunity to make a sequel -- but I can't wait to read the French subtitles for "Pardon Monsieur, but I must bleed on you NOW! GRRRRRRRR!"
Joking aside, what this movie does extremely well is create the spooky atmosphere of a civilization at ground zero and what it would be like to start over from scratch. Sure, it's set in London, but I could see the same situation applying to Los Angeles, New York or any other large metro area in the world.
This is not an up-with-people movie -- and if nihilistic blood and gore is not your thing, stay far away. If you enjoyed the first film, there's enough here to recommend seeing this on the big screen (they obviously had a bigger FX budget for this film and it shows during the fire bombing sequence). The storytelling itself is just not as strong as the first film.