28 Weeks Later

Review by Loc

To complete the Sandra Bullock trilogy, audiences have been treated to the threequel to her wildly popular rehab flick 28 Days. Whereas 28 Days focused on struggling alcoholics and a pre-Aragorn Viggo Mortensen, 28 Days Later went a whole new direction with hardcore zombie action and no sight of Sandra anywhere. Instead, we see a London instantly ravaged by a biological virus so virulent that it decimated one the preeminent cities of the world in less than a month. So what does the final chapter have in store for Sandra? Quick hit: hot zombie action.

Ok, so the Sandra Bullock joke only amuses me. Luckily, I go by the mantra of, if you can’t make yourself laugh, how are you gonna make others chuckle? Moving on, 28 Weeks Later is the mainstream, big-budget follow-up to the low-key original. Where the first film gained notoriety for its miniscule budget, 28 Weeks Later boasts healthy production values, big explosions, and Hollywood bonanza! Hell, when you’ve got the US army repatriating the decimated London, you damn well better bring the noise! Yeahhh!

So, all patriotism aside, we’ve set the table with the plot. Roughly seven months after the initial viral outbreak, London is ready to be rebuilt. The virus seemingly died as all the zombies starved themselves to death. And now, we have a well-laid plan on how o reconstruct the city and country. Sweet. But, is the Rage virus really dead? No, of course not. And what happens when you have a zombie outbreak plus lots of soldiers with big guns? I’ll tell you what happens, you get a blistering sequel to the little low-budget indie flick that started it all.

The plot isn’t too important, but it moves very well and does a pretty good job of staying true to the original. One of the greatest aspects of 28 Days Later was the realism it tried to set up. If you have a viral outrbreak, what would zombies do? Toss out the slow zombie-walk, introduce the freaky-ass zombie sprint! What do you do if you find yourself in a city full of cannibal zombies? You hole up in your apartment, or you run your ass off to a car, you pillage the deserted grocery stores, you do everything you can to survive. For 28 Weeks Later, there are a couple leaps of movie logic that make it more goofy than the first. Stuff like the stalking-zombie or accidental-sibling-reunion-during-zombie-chaos make it hard to return to the pseudo-reality of this movie universe. But, for the most part, plot and story works well to deliver the goods.

And those goods are zombie madness! Even the start of the movie is zombie homage, the locked in the house attack. And from there it moves into full zombie sprinting and zombie swimming, its overall goodness. There are some moments of extreme violence, afterall, you can’t have a Rage virus without uncontrolled rage. However, for the most part, the thriller action is exactly that, thriller, edge-of-your-seat zombified destruction. Good stuff.

Overall, 28 Weeks Later is a good romp. Zombie death and destruction quotient is high. Dumb plot points are pretty low. Acting performances are very solid. Action and blowing up stuff, solid as well. Camp factor, very low. Camp factor does factor in to one point, the ending left me groaning the bad groan of “ughness”. But hey, to each their own. Out of 28 weeks needed to kill off the Rage virus, 28 Weeks Later serves up 20 weeks. I tried to resist the 28 week scale, but I couldn’t. I’m sorry.