Iraq War Politics and Family Values Mix Easily With Bloodstruck Zombies

Rating: Null/10 (21 May 2007)

28 Days Later is one of the better, more serious horror films ever made.
But since its premiere, lesser zombie films have rushed to trade on the Zombie film's reputation. First there is Shaun of the Dead, a Brit kitchen sink comedy that shows us the lighter side of zombies and even how to deal with them if one ever encounters a real one.
Fox and the Brits are back with 28 WEEKS Later, a decidedly weaker effort than Days, with Iraq War failures intermixed with dabs of Family Values. The movie is bad but the politics are the cheekiest since the Full Monty.
What remained of Brit forces, wiped up the carnage of 28 Days Later. But this bigger production demands a mightier crew: Yes, I'm afraid they've brought in the Americans. The US Army with all of its smugness intact is ready to screw it up and make a mess. This way, see, we don't just have just a zombie movie here but a metaphor for the joint British-American Failures in Iraq.
Lets not forget family values. Robert Carlyle seems a bad choice for the father of two little girls. After all, Carlyle abandoned Frank and Malachy McCourt., left them to fend for themselves in Limerick Ireland. Carlyle wandered off to England for good when wife Angela and the family became a burden in Angela's Ashes. Also, he didn't provide the greatest fatherly example when stripped to the essential Full Monty in the movie by that name.
Six months after the quelling of the Zombie invasion, civilians return to the boroughs of London to find US Army helicopters circling over Big Ben and the Thames, and US Army sharpshooters on the roofs watching for re-emerging zombies to return for another blood feast.
Despite the American presence, the yanks in the cast don't seem genuine. Seasoned Americans- I'm one of those- can spot this instantly. Brit actors can fake the accent and the look the ticket in some varieties of American movies, particularly when there are other Americans in the cast. But these 'Americans' have to be modeled after signature American types. These GIS ARE Americans though. They just seem a lot like Brits. Without the f*ck*n' adjective in every three word sentence and the US uniforms, you wouldn't know they were yanks at all.
The problem is really that Brit filmmakers don't know that in a movie like this you make use of stock American types. They've got one guy, the Black US army general who is modeled on the authoritative figure, often cast as a cop, that Ernie Hudson plays in stateside movies. Hudson is macho. He's got all the cool left over from Richard Roundtree's portrayal of John Shaft in 1971 and some menace besides. This guy playing the general in command of US Forces in London is decidedly weak tea by comparison.
Carlyle's kids are angry at him for telling them their mother is dead, but tries to con them instead, saying he only said that the Zombie kissed their mom. When the mom turns up alive, apparently untouched by the zombie contagion, a combination of full-fledged AIDS with Rabies combined, a nurse decides that she and her daughters must be preserved at all costs. Their blood could be the source of a protective serum against the Virus.
The efforts to isolate and quarantine any stray zombie still operating go awry when Carlyle, overwhelmed by guilt for fibbing to his kids, tries to at least straighten it out with the suddenly alive missus. But she really did get kissed by a zombie, and for Carlyle, that's the rub. In the time it takes to passionately kiss his wife, Carlyle is transformed into the most rabid of zombies. He cuts himself a swath of victims-cum-zombies just in the hospital alone, that reignites the crisis of six months ago. Suddenly, the smug Americans on rooftops have to break away from the peeping tom role they've been playing with rifle telescopes and do some serious shooting. But like the Iraq venture, the sharpshooting soon runs amok. A rooftop shooter named Doyle stops shooting, realizing the sharpshooters are now killing innocent citizens, unable to separate zombies from human beings.
Doyle teams up with Carlyle's two daughters who are now fleeing poison gas attacks and rockets from those American helicopters overhead, along with sniper fire from his brethren still atop the city's major buildings. One sniper pumps a bullet into the statue of Lord Wellington in Trafalgar Square as Big Ben strikes the hour. Its all low comedy to make sport of the American GI ignorance of British tradition and landmarks.
Doyle is killed but the two daughters escape to a Soccer stadium where Doyle's friend, a black helicopter pilot, brings them aboard and the craft wends its way out to sea over the White Cliffs of Dover. I can faintly hear the strains of Vera Lynn singing When the Lights Go On Again, as the Yanks, aided by the pluckier Brits, mount a quick counterattack and end the film.
28 weeks later isn't a great film, but its a sly dig at the Bush Administration and the Poodle Acquiescense of Tony Blair.