A warning on '28 Days' the zombie flick: It's catchy

Friday, June 27, 2003

By WILLIAM ARNOLD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

Yes, I also assumed from its title that "28 Days Later" was a sequel to the 2000 Sandra Bullock comedy, "28 Days." But no: what we have here is a blood-soaked, post-apocalyptic zombie movie in the tradition of George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead."

MOVIE REVIEW

28 DAYS LATER

DIRECTOR: Danny Boyle

CAST: Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Christopher Eccleston

RUNNING TIME: 112 minutes

RATING: R for strong violence, gore, language and nudity

WHERE: Alderwood 7, Cinema 17, East Valley 13, Everett 9, Factoria, Galleria 11, Lewis & Clark, Longston Place 14, Marysville Cinema 14, Metro, Monroe 12, Mountlake 9, Redmond Town Center, Woodinville 12

GRADE: B

Those 28 days are how long it takes to turn London into a hellhole of rotting corpses and slobbering monsters after a group of ill-advised animal-rights activists break into a lab and release a chimp contaminated with an artificially created virus called "rage."

The virus has skipped a few Londoners, however, including a handsome young man recovering in an intensive-care unit from a traffic accident (Cillian Murphy), a streetwise black woman (Naomie Harris) and a taxi driver (Brendan Gleeson) and his teenage daughter (Megan Burns).

So the quest of this group of survivors is to get out of London and journey to what they hope will be the safety of the Midlands, while avoiding attacks by the crazed near-dead whose bites will hopelessly transform them into snarling ghouls within a mere 10 seconds.

Director Danny Boyle ("Trainspotting") makes no bones about the fact that his movie is a genre piece that happily rips off not only the Romero zombie movies but such end-of-civilization classics as 1959's "The World, the Flesh and the Devil" and 1971's "The Omega Man."

And he does an effective job of it. He gives us some truly harrowing sequences and a succession of images that stick in the mind like a bad dream -- especially his numerous eerie cityscapes of a London that's been turned into a vast ghost town.

But the timing of this movie may not be as great as the producers think. Our current rampant virus-phobia also works against it as escapist fun. With SARS, monkeypox and a resurgent AIDS all around us, this thing is just a little too close for entertaining comfort.