Tiresomely derivative (if expensive) this post-apocalypse movie has few likable characters and is filled with holes

Rating: 3/10 (7 October 2006)

Although its fighting scenes are elegantly visual in places, and there is some pacey action, the content of this film is so tiresomely familiar and cliché-ridden it is remarkable some people have been writing so favourably. Once again we are in a post-apocalyptic western country (England) in which a right wing semi-fascist government is rounding up immigrants and subversives. Once again we meet the Resistance and yes the plot harks back nostalgically to the idyllic freedom of the 60s, even its patron saint being an old hippie (played with usual gusto by Michael Caine). Once again the hero and heroine fight to escape to a Better Place, here some nebulous scientific project across the ocean. At least 'V For Vendetta had flashes of originality and did not, as this does, come over (unintentionally) as a right wing rant, especially in the way foreigners are portrayed as half-crazed. There is something smug and self-congratulatory in the way such ancient themes are recycled as if the makers have been the first to discover them. In fact the merest zombie movie boasts more engaging characters and also seems more accurate-- and less derivative-- about what a breakdown in society might actually look like. Worse yet, even on an action level the plot is riddled with terrible holes. A car chase where the hero's car cannot be bump-started on a steep hill but magically comes to life on a mud flat just in time to save the occupants! The hero and heroine's semi-magical release from a building surrounded by ferocious troops by holding the world's only surviving baby aloft yet while the baby is valued enough to paralyze all action, the troops subsequently ignore it and get back to fighting, leaving the hero and heroine to go free. It's this kind of sloppyness in follow-though that makes the whole film risible specially since such sequences are mounted with gushing sentimentality.