28 Days Later

June 18, 2005

Rated: R Runtime: 108 min Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

28 Days. That’s an appropriate title because that’s exactly long this movie felt. This is likely to be one of those films where we’re on the opposite end of the spectrum from “critics”. The critics will love it, while we’re going to rate it low. Artistically, we can see a lot to like in this movie, but our ratings are based on how entertained we were. And we must’ve checked our watches and adjusted in our seats at least a dozen times.

28 Days Later

The storyline was promising. A guy has been comatose in the hospital and wakes up to find that he’s apparently alone. There’s no one in the hospital, the street outside or apparently the entire city. A virus has taken almost everyone, turning them into zombie like creatures that only move in the dark.

Danny Boyle, of Trainspotting fame, is the director. The cast features a couple of people who look familiar, but no one you’re likely to actually know by name. The film has a documentary look that is intentional as this was shot on video. We speculate that the budget was about “three-fiddy”. He should’ve spent some of that on an editor because the film started to drag at about the halfway point and had really lost us by the end when things were really starting to go over the top. And the ending is a commercial cop out instead of the logical one, just to put the cherry on top.

The first half of the movie shows a lot of promise, we really liked the premise. But it built up the tension and then just kind of wandered into the weeds as the story started to drift onto tangents that were almost preaching to us. As a booger movie, the boogers should’ve played a much more prominent role. But we’re not going to overanalyze this movie, instead we’re going to just tell you that it lost us about halfway thru and left us a bit bored by the time it ended. We give it 2 stars, it’s artistic enough to be worth a DVD rental.

Posted by Billy Bob | Filed Under 2 Stars, Brendan Gleeson, Christopher Eccleston, Cillian Murphy, DVD, Horror, Megan Burns, Naomie Harris, R