Rating of
2.5/4
"28 Days Later" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 03/22/12
A young bicycle courier wakes up from surgery in central London to find it completely deserted, until he is attacked by a horde of rabid people screaming for his blood. Danny Boyle's spin on the zombie movie, although as inevitably generic as you'd expect has enough quirks to make it stand out from an overpopulated crowd. The English locations alone are enough to give it an unusual flavour and the scenes that show him wandering through the empty city are genuinely spooky. When "the infected" appear it settles down into the usual cliches but at least Boyle understands the genre better than most and concentrates on the psychological horror of the death of civilisation and the zombie attacks have the requisite tension and suspense. Unfortunately the second half of the film is far weaker than the first. Christopher Eccleston's squad of troops operating on the ragged edge clearly owe a debt to Romero's Day Of The Dead and are quite believable British versions of their gung ho American counterparts, although this sequence suffers for some weak dialogue and poor performances. Add an unsatisfying conclusion which is nothing more than a half-hearted 50s B-Movie happy ending and 28 Days Later can hardly be described as perfect, but it's different enough to be worth a look.
