28 Weeks Later
Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Rated: MA
Now screening

It's not necessary to have seen 2003's sharp horror film '28 Days Later' to understand the turn of events that transpire in this sequel, '28 Weeks Later'. It is, however, almost impossible to discuss the latter film without comparing it to the former. Like its predecessor '28 Weeks Later' manages to deliver an intense, frequently uncomfortable experience - but the horror of it all is undercut by some of the sequel's foibles.

As its title would suggest '28 Weeks Later' takes place almost six months after the events of the original film. The 'rage' virus that caused people to immediately develop a murderous bloodlust has been contained, and the few thousand survivors are re-entering a small section of Britain under strict control and surveillance by the US military. All's well until a surviving carrier of the virus spreads it back into the small population of survivors, and then all hell eventually breaks loose. With no good ideas to contain the virus and with little chance of discerning the infected from the frightened civilians - after all, they're all running so quickly - the military eventually opt to simply shoot down anything that moves, just before they start orchestrating the destruction of entire chunks of Britain in an attempt to take down the new outbreak. This doesn't bode well for a small group of survivors, including young siblings Andy and Tammy (Mackintosh Muggleton and Imogen Poots) and the US military's chief medical researcher Scarlett (Australian actress Rose Byrne), who find themselves the target of both a crowd of murderous civilians and a military that seems to try and solve everything through ridiculous amounts of firepower.

Evidently it doesn't bode that well for the audience, either. The out-of-place political allegory that director Fresnadillo seems to be shooting for (no pun intended) with his US troops that draw on everything from sniper rifles to napalm does little more than distract the viewer from what is otherwise an intense horror film in which the central characters are always on the run from something. It's hard to buy into a military that would level the entirety of the United Kingdom to kill off the afflicted, especially when the film makes clear that the rage victims would just as easily die of starvation.

Worse yet, '28 Weeks Later' bumps the gore factor up to ludicrous levels, losing the impact that its predecessor managed to achieve through implying most of the violence slightly offscreen rather than providing close-ups of it. In some cases, such as one scene involving a helicopter, the film becomes so surreally over-the-top as to be unintentionally funny. Even with these rather noticeable flaws, though, much of the film is still creepy enough to get most audiences on edge and make them jump. It's just hard to shake the feeling that with a little more restraint, '28 Weeks Later' could have been even more unsettling.

Brian O'Neill