Here I am with the last review for a movie I got to before the start of November. I actually had two choices to go with if I wanted to take care of stuff on my HBO Max watchlist before it left the service: Say Anything or the sequel to 28 Days Later, namely 28 Weeks Later, that fast-moving, quasi-zombie movie from Great Britain. Both are on my Fill-In Filmography. Both are movies I hadn’t seen before. And I was pretty sure both would probably pop up somewhere else before too long if I missed one or both of them.
I opted for the running zombies since it was Halloween night, and I really only send out at most one review a day around here. It just seemed more appropriate.
Featuring none of the original cast, the movie opens with a group of survivors hiding out at a cottage in the middle of nowhere, basically waiting for the infected to all die of starvation and then everything could just move on. Don (Robert Carlyle) is waiting there with his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack) and some others when a young, uninfected boy shows up looking for help. Alice lets him in, but the infected follow, break in, and appear to kill or infect everyone inside except for Don, who manages to run away while being something of a coward since he didn’t work harder to save Alice.
Time passes, and around 28 weeks after the initial infection, the infected did indeed all starve to death, and NATO, under American military leadership, is slowly moving British refugees back into London. That includes Don and Alice’s children Tammy and Andy (Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton), reunited with their father, a man ashamed of the actions he undertook to survive. However, as pointed out by various doctors, there’s a lot that isn’t known about how the Rage Virus works, and when a woman shows up, infected but not symptomatic and still in full control of her faculties, it would appear that it is possible for someone to be a carrier but not filled with an uncontrollable urge to commit violence. However, that just means that there is soon a new outbreak of Rage running through the safe zone, complete with a new patient zero who seems to be a lot smarter than most of the infected. Can American sniper Doyle (Jeremy Renner), his helicopter pilot pal Flynn (Harold Perrineau), and medical officer Scarlet (Rose Byrne) get some of the survivors out and maybe find some hope for overcoming the virus once and for all?
OK, setting aside the fact that this movie contains none of the characters from the first–hardly a dealbreaker because it’s not like other zombies film series keep following the same survivors–the whole tone this time around was very different. 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle treated other survivors as the real villains, people who used the Rage outbreak as an excuse to gain power over a shattered society. This time around, the movie feels a lot more like an action movie in many respects. The infected as the villains, with the aforementioned patient zero character as the face of the second outbreak. Yes, the American military does a lot of things that don’t exactly paint them as heroic in an effort to stem the newest outbreak, but at the end of the movie, it really is more about the infection spreading and not about a handful of survivors finding hope. If anything, this sequel while also being more infected-focused is also a lot bleaker. Don’s survival in the opening minutes is the first sign of that as he runs for his life, the lone survivor of a small group of people. The end suggests there will be more bad times to come in what was probably intended to be another sequel, namely 28 Months Later that has yet to see the light of day.
I am more or less fine with that. Sometimes the best thing to do with any horror franchise, if two movies can make a franchise, is to know when to quit. True, box office probably has more of a say in such a happening as anything else, and though I didn’t hate this movie or anything, it did feel like a step down from the better first movie. Maybe there are more stories to tell with the Rage Virus, and certainly there’s some sequel baiting on display at the end of this one, but for now, I figure they ended in a good spot with a movie that was fun enough, but not exactly on par with what I was hoping for after the previous film.
Grade: C+
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