It’s hard to tell whether the movie is trying to be a straight-up horror film or an extremely straight-faced spoof of cheesy horror movies. There’s nothing jokey about the horrific plague that overtakes England or the situations in which the few survivors find themselves, but how can you possibly take seriously a movie in which characters blithely wander into dark tunnels instead of taking a bridge, or saunter into creepy, dark buildings without even the pretense of an actual reason? Each time this happened, the whole audience groaned in that “don’t go into the basement, moron!” way, and it’s hard to believe that the filmmakers wouldn’t anticipate that reaction. But nothing really signals these actions as self-aware or satirical, and combined with the sloppy, internally inconsistent execution of an intriguing idea, it just makes the movie seem kind of stupid. It’s not even especially scary, mostly just gross.
It’s a shame, because the core cast deserves better. Cillian Murphy is quite good as Jim, a bike courier who awakens in a hospital to find it and the entire city of London deserted. (The scenes of him wandering the eerie, completely empty streets would have been a lot more effective had they not been scored to blaring music; in fact, the musical soundtrack is one of the worst failings of the movie. You can always, but always, gauge the level of danger by the musical cues; scenes that could have ratcheted up the tension by implying potential danger instead are lifeless because the soothing music lets you know the heroes are in no immediate peril, and not once does the music ever mislead you.) Eventually, he stumbles upon some other living creatures: first “the Infected,” red-eyed, psychotic zombies, then a couple of survivors, including the brusquely pragmatic Selena (the terrific Naomie Harris), who in a short time has not only figured out some basic rules of survival but adapted mentally to the immediate exigencies (when Jim suggests that they ought to have some goal beyond mere survival, she crisply mocks him and cinematic convention: “Shall we find a cure and save the world, or just fall in love and fuck?”). They find two more survivors, Frank and his daughter Hannah; Frank is immediately the most appealing character in the movie by virtue of being played by Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson is, as always, marvelous, and here he’s a gentle, warm family man, in contrast to his usual roguish type. The movie is poorer without him.
The film has an appealing gallows humor (in a church, someone has written on the wall in giant letters, “Repent: the end is extremely fucking nigh”) but not nearly enough of it. It might even be too subtle about making the point that we are the cause of our own destruction: the plague starts when some PETA-type activists free lab chimps who’ve been forced, Clockwork Orange-style, to watch extremely violent human acts, which has somehow created a contagious agent in their blood that turns them into bloodthirsty rageaholics (“They’re infected – with rage!” warns a scientist, which I don’t think was meant to sound as funny as it did). The infection spreads through blood and saliva; just a drop is enough to turn the victim into a slavering zombie (although it’s extremely convenient that the incubation period is 10-20 seconds, unlike something like AIDS or even SARS, and shouldn’t someone be resistant to it? I mean, someone like Mr. Rogers couldn't really turn into a rage zombie, could he?). And I should mention that the Infecteds vomit blood a lot, so yeah, extremely gross. Only once, really, does the film allow the point that an enraged healthy human is nearly indistinguishable from an “Infected.” (The Infecteds are pretty cool, though, shown in jerky, flickering motion and with nightmarish red eyes.) But the filmmakers don’t even attempt to make the Infecteds at all believable: they attack healthy people but not each other; they seem to understand, say, mirrors perfectly but not barbed wire or guns; they’ll apparently starve to death at some point, although after a month they appear to still be going strong despite no evident nourishment (they don’t seem to eat bodies, and the survivors are constantly finding food scattered all over and untouched supermarkets). It all points to laziness and inattention, as though the filmmakers had a great idea but never bothered to really think about it.
It’s disappointing; I would have loved a nice, gritty, cynical blast of a movie to cut through the summer blockbuster dreck. Instead, 28 Days Later is all too similar to the brainless multiplex fare, except it looks cheaper.
For once, I actually have something good to say about Arch Campbell. For those of you not in DC, Campbell is the doltish, simple-minded movie critic for the local NBC affiliate; if a movie is at all adventurous, intelligent, off-beat, dark, or… well, good, chances are he’ll hate it. He makes Gene Shalit look like Pauline Kael. Anyway, at this screening, he sat two rows in front of me. In the row between us were three meaty, boisterous frat boys who’d been braying with laughter and hollering at each other like they were on opposite sides of the theater instead of right next to each other. I’d been dreading listening to them throughout the movie. But one of them recognized Arch Campbell and excitedly pointed him out to his buddies. I thought, “Hm, maybe they’ll have a little respect for a genuine movie critic, even if they haven’t any for the people sitting around them.” And damned if they didn’t: they hushed up instantly and stayed fairly quiet for the entire film. So, thanks, Arch, for engendering respect among the boorish masses. (Unfortunately, he couldn’t do anything about the gargantuan heed [shout out to So I Married an Axe Murderer] and bloated arms of the NFL wanna-be in front of me, which forced me to bend at a nearly 90-degree angle for most of the movie just to be able to see the screen.)
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