Watched 28 Weeks Later last night, the sequel to 28 Days Later. It was great fun. A little bit scary, a little too gruesome, but brilliantly suspenseful.
Robert Carlyle gave one of his better performances. He’s a brilliant actor but for much of his recent movie/TV movie career he’s been suffering some hacky but no doubt lucrative scripts; the problem is, even the best actor delivering clunky, Dan Brown-esque dialogue is going to come across like a bad actor. So it was good to see him reunited with Danny Boyle; 28 Weeks Later’s script isn’t quite as breathtakingly dynamic as its predecessor but is nevertheless a damn fine piece of work in its own right.
If you threatened to set a rage-infected person on me if I didn’t find something to quibble about, my few quibbles would be that the day-for-night sequences didn’t convince (looking like an over-compressed DVD) and that, like all horror movies, occasionally the plot requires people to do some really stupid things. Usually it’s walking in a sleeping gown through the graveyard after midnight, or playing the videotape just to check whether the stories about everyone who plays the videotape dying one week afterwards are true; in 28 Weeks Later it’s someone breaking quarantine because they’ve not considered the possibility of an asymptomatic carrier; of the US military not installing CCTV in their quarantine chambers; and, one for all the east Londoners, the US military sealing off all routes of escape from the Isle of Dogs but forgetting about the Greenwich foot tunnel.
That was quite exciting. Zombies on my jogging route. Next time I go for a jog, I shall imagine a horde of wild-eyed gibbering monsters chasing me, and will run just a little bit faster. And the person in front of me will run just a little bit faster to get away from me.
