Decent, if unspectacular, zombie flick

Rating: 6/10 (9 August 2008)

"28 Weeks Later" picks up where "28 Days Later" left off. The virus that's been turning ordinary human beings into flesh-eating zombies has apparently run its course, the infected humans have all died of starvation, and Britain is slowly being repopulated with many of the citizens who fled the scene at the start of the epidemic. One of those returnees is Don (played by Robert Carlyle), who is suffering from survivor's guilt after leaving his wife in a moment of panic to be devoured by the creatures. Or was she? Suffice it to say, it's hard to keep a good virus down and soon London is in the grip of a major new outbreak of the illness. Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Imogen Poots and MacKintosh Muggleton (what a great name!) play various characters who spend the bulk of the movie running for their lives from the menace.
Zombie pictures have become such a staple of the horror movie genre that it is hard for anyone to do anything particularly novel or original with them anymore. Zombie bites human, human turns into zombie, new zombie bites another human, and on it goes ad infinitum. That scenario may have been fresh and exciting when George Romero first introduced it to the world in "Night of the Living Dead" back in 1968, but it has been diluted through repetition and overuse ever since (partly by Romero himself with his endless, ever diminishing variations on the theme). The one innovation the original "28 Days Later" came up with was to speed up the zombies' movements so that they were no longer the lumbering creatures that anyone's 85-year-old granny could easily outrun.
"28 Weeks Later" has some genuinely suspenseful moments and a nice post-apocalyptic feel in its early stretches, but, like its predecessor, it tends to devolve into a tedious shooting-gallery sideshow the longer it goes on. Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's hurdy-gurdy film-making style, which is intended to replicate the chaos and pandemonium of the situation, often leads more to confusion than to clarification for the audience. Still, the movie contains a few cool plot twists and raises some thorny ethical issues, such as whether or not innocent people are to be sacrificed if that means ensuring the safety of the population as a whole. And there is certainly more than enough bloodshed and general mayhem to keep the zombiephiles among us rooted to our seats. Even the undead should have fun with that.