Soulless, boring and ridiculously stupid - a turgid sequel to an overrated original.

Rating: 4/10 (8 October 2007)

I wasn't in a rush to see this film when it was released as, despite the fact that the idea for the film is interesting, the film that this one sprang from - 28 Days Later - is one of my least favourite popular modern horror films. I was really hoping that this sequel would deliver, and after the first ten minutes, it seemed like it might do. I'm not a fan of the whole fast zombie thing, but the opening to this film is action packed and exciting and it seemed like the film was going to give way to something like the film that the original one could have been. The basic plot is similar to George Romero's Land of the Dead, and focuses on the idea of survivors coming back to live in a land savaged by zombies. In particular we focus on one family, the mother of which we see killed when the father left her to the hordes of undead and ran away. The story picks up when the kids return from a refugee camp in Spain to live with their father. The first half of the film is really quite good; we get plenty of eerie location shots and the plot seems fairly interesting...but then the first twist comes into play and it seems like the writers are taking their audience for fools...
I can't believe how ridiculously stupid the central plot of this movie is. Without giving anything away, the script writers take coincidence, stir it up with plenty of moronic character decisions, sprinkle on a few plot holes and expect everyone to buy into it! (And even more unbelievably, many people have...). Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo expertly captures the soulless, MTV music video style of the first film, and ensures that the characters snugly fit this, as despite a little character building for Robert Carlyle's character; everyone featured is impossible to care for, and the two central characters are incredibly irritating, too. Fresnadillo obviously subscribes to the view that freewheeling camera angles and flashy editing make films exciting, and that's a shame as they don't. This stuff only serves in making the film boring as it's usually impossible to see what's going on. The film does have a couple of plus points; the shots of an abandoned London are good, there's also a cool scene involving a horde of zombies and a helicopter and, as mentioned, the first ten minutes are good. Other than that, 28 Weeks Later is a horrible film with so many illogical distractions that I didn't even bother to think that Wembley Stadium wouldn't have been finished by the time of this film if there wasn't anyone around to finish it. I honestly can't believe this film got, and continues to get, good reviews...there's far better horror out there than this.