The guts and the ingloriousness

Rating: 6/10 (4 June 2011)

Danny Boyle directed 28 Days Later, and he exec-produced this sequel as part of his burgeoning partnership with Alex Garland. Directing duties fell to Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, creator of 2001's ingenious Intacto. He stamps his authority on the picture with a startling opening sequence: a dizzying attack on a country farmhouse, which not only violently reminds us that these are far from George Romero's shambling knuckle-draggers, but also that anyone – man or woman, young or old – is fair game. It sets the tone. It sets the rules.
Next we're thrown into a grimy, semi-deserted London (reminiscent of another Spanish-speaking director's apocalyptic vision, Children of Men). It's here that Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) arrive to meet their father, Don (Robert Carlyle). But something is rotten as a corpse within the family unit, and the kids take it upon themselves to sneak out of the militarised zone to put a full-stop on their unfinished childhood. What they discover unleashes hell, and it's up to the US occupying forces, led by a stolid Idris Elba, to quash the infected insurgency.
The film's early sequences contain some creepy, classical horror imagery, usually concerning Catherine McCormack's stricken Alice, before the film gives way to a series of expansive, logic-be-damned action set-pieces. As a marriage of styles it's not quite as broken as Alice and Don's, but it makes the film feel lopsided.
While The Walking Dead proves that the zombie holocaust genre hasn't really the flesh to fill a whole series, an extra 20 minutes wouldn't have gone amiss from 28 Weeks, just to add a little meat to the bony characters – particularly Jeremy Renner's pragmatic Doyle, who seems to be riding on a kind of Hurt Locker zephyr, but with hints of a heart. Rose Byrne, likewise, as Scarlet, can only show a glimmer of the utilitarian behind the perma-frown.
There's no profundity on offer here, just basic moral dilemmas as fleeting as a moving target in a gun sight. At a push there's a veiled allegory about post-war Britain's reliance on the US; and moreover, particularly in one barmy sniper sequence, a crack at repeated "friendly fire" debacles in the theatres of madness mired in the Middle East. But it's really about the visceral thrills. Like its predecessor, budget restraints are a blessing not a curse, forcing imaginative film-craft and rabid performances into the space that, one fears, CGI excess will occupy when the infection extends to 28 Months.