A sequel that doesn't live up to the first - no surprise!

Rating: 4/10 (8 April 2010)

I thought the first movie was good, it wasn't perfect, but good. The thing that held the first movie was the production side of it, Danny Boyle's direction and the score as well as great acting. Here, we had nothing but a decent story and that along works for lower budget horrors, but ones with such a huge funding as this one had, we expect more.
Its 28 weeks later and the rebuilding of England is under way. The city is controlled under U.S. military and only a small section of one city is allowing people to come back. One man who had left his wife cowardly during an attack has fled and is now working with the military to rebuild the city and his two children who had been in America return to see him an begin their new life.
One day the little boy claims he has almost forgotten what his mother looks like, so he and big sister sneak out to their old house and find their mother is there and wasn't killed by the infected after all. She ends up in the city and medics soon learn she is in fact infected herself, but somehow able to not be in rage like the others. She later bites her cowardly husband and he then turns the city one by one and all hell once again breaks out.
The direction in the movie was bad, there were no beautiful shots, nothing impressive and an obvious rip off at times to Boyle's original work. He had too many close-ups and I found myself so often hating the cinematography. Conducter John Murphy only had two weeks to work on his score and it was nothing great either, almost entirely recycled music from the first movie. The movie finally picks up about half way through, but by this time it's so predictable that it is a let down.
Much of the acting is good, Robert Carlyse had been offered a part in part one but refused and here he does a great job. John Murphy also did a great job as Doyle, I kept wondering where I had seen this guy before and he had did a great job years before playing the title role in the movie Dahmer.
I didn't hate this movie, but I was disappointed. There wasn't a lot of personal encounters with the infected. This was not a zombie movie, but it lacked what zombie movies have and that is some focus on the monster. We watch these types of movies to get scared and see these creatures and here, as in part one, the infected were not the main characters. That type of movie making is not good for horror, the drama is nice, but we need more scares.
I can recommend it to people because its good for a watch. I gave it 4 out of 10 stars.