(courtesy IMP Awards)
Sustaining interest in a movie franchise is a tricky business.
If you simply keep serving up more of the same, with little variation or innovation on narrative or prevailing themes, audiences will quickly grow bored, walk away and gut your box office; but if you go too far out on a limb and try to be too adventurous, you risk alienating people from what they liked in the first place.
It’s a difficult call but as the A Quiet Place franchise shows, among a number of examples, it is possible to be both cognisant of what’s been done before, and which attracted the punters in the first place while going to some bold and creatively interesting places.
The good news with 28 Years Later, the third film in a franchise which kicked off with 28 Days Later in 2002 and continued with 28 Weeks Later in 2007, is that director Danny Boyle and Alex Garland got the memo about not staying in the same-old, same-old rut.
To their credit, and there is a great deal to like about this long-delayed third entry, which will be joined in fairly fast fashion by the fourth film in the series, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, in mid-January 2026, the two creative forces behind the franchise haven’t simply served more seat-of-your-pants zombie thrills and spills.
They are there, of course, because how could they not be in a franchise, or a genre as a whole really, that survives on the tension of a frantic and perilous race for survival by those still in the land of the living, but in 28 Years Later they are not the whole story, not by a long shot.
This both serves the film well and hobbles it at the same time.
On the plus side, it serves to connect the latest entry to the franchise to its predecessors by serving up a fairly health dose of scary moments where the survival of key characters, chief among them Spike (Alfie Williams) who finds himself running for his life on the mainland after a rite of passage from his sanctuary community on Lindisfarne goes terribly wrong, is never a given.
There are some genuinely terrifying moments where the newly evolved Rage Virus zombies, which seem to have developed enough sentience to form still largely instinct-driven tribes led by Alphas like Samon (Chi Lewis-Perry), looks like grabbing a few unlucky more survivors for its endlessly angry viral clutches.
Spike and his dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who has a bizarre devil-may-care attitude that suggests he has not coped well with the PTSD stemming from his narrow survival of a Rage Virus attack that felled the rest of his family including his minister father who saw the zombies as a welcome sign of the End Times, almost join them but somehow don’t in moments that definitely have you sitting up ramrod-straight, almost willing the father and son duo to run that little bit faster.
Some people aren’t as lucky – who they are should be left to the viewing of the film but suffice to say, one in particular deserves everything he gruesomely gets – and between Spike and dad ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- making it back home to live another day, and others ending up more than a little dead at the hands of fast-moving evolved zombies, 28 Years Later ticks its scary horror box emphatically and with extreme prejudice.
Where Garland and Boyle play with the formula, and again relatively successfully thought without some gaping plotholes, tonal issues and odd narrative shifts, is by dialing down some of the action so the more human, intimate moments are given a chance to breathe.
Without giving too much away, this includes Spike and his mother isla (Jodie Cromer) trying to get help for the latter’s debilitating illness by journeying to find supposedly mad doctor Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) who go through the ringer on their journey across an Infested-filled UK – Britain and Ireland are backward quarantine zones while the rest of Europe, and indeed the world, goes on much as it always has – and who are allowed to deal with some pressing and very real issues that come with being human beings desperately trying to survive in a world gone ragingly crazy.
Where 28 Years Later gives these scenes a chance to find their natural sense and rhythm, the film excels, giving us a humanity that, while it’s always been evident in the franchise, really goes front and centre here.
It makes sense that the world which exists beyond merely surviving, which is brought to life by the community on Lindisfarne, gets to take front of stage since we are considerably beyond the early days of this nightmarish pandemic.
Unfortunately, it’s in the space between the thrills and spills, and its more ruminative moments that 28 Years Later stumbles.
It doesn’t seem able to decide what it wants to be exactly, and this indecision, likely borne of a commendable desire to give the franchise new life, narratively at least, costs 28 Years Later.
Caught in-between the two competing drivers, the film loses momentum and focus, and while individual scenes and characters are compelling, 28 Years Later overall falls flat, leaving underwhelmed for the most part.
It likely doesn’t help that the film is the first of a sequel trilogy and seems to exist more as a set-up than anything else; the thing is though that 28 Years Later squanders its world-building and appealingly complex characterisation simply to place where he needs to be for the tonally-whiplashing final act which frankly is bizarre and quite bonkers.
No doubt, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple will fill in the blanks and retrospectively make the final act make more sense, but that’s no good to anyone watching this film which should be able to stand on it own two feet without needing a successor entry to frame it better.
While 28 Years Later is by no means a disaster, and has a great deal to recommend it, it doesn’t assemble the many brilliantly good pieces at its disposal well, failing to stick a landing that could have very good indeed instead of merely serviceable, and squandering a worthy addition to the franchise, which to be fair does try to creatively push the envelope, as it attempts to give life to future instalments, a gambit that simply doesn’t pay off in anything like the way it needs to.