28 Weeks Later Is An Awful Movie

Let's get one thing out there right from the start: 28 Weeks Later sucks. Hard. It's such a horrible movie, it makes me hate 28 Days Later for having inspired it. It's such a horrible movie, that if I had to choose between watching this or watching BloodRayne, I'd probably choose BloodRayne. It's that bad. The writing is weak, the directing is tremendously awful, and the cast acts like they'd rather be anywhere else on the planet than making this movie.

The movie looks like it was made using an epileptic camera crew and an editor that decided to make a cut every second and a half. We never get any sense of what is happening during any of the action sequences, because they're so poorly crafted. A hummingbird couldn't make heads or tails of this mess. And let's not forget that laughable night-vision sequence. It looks like a bad combination of The Blair Witch Project and Paris Hilton's sex tape, and the funny part is that it wasn't even all that dark in the area the characters were in to begin with. You know you're screwing up when you're attempting a serious scene and the audience is laughing harder and harder as time goes on.

And while the movie has an intriguing concept, everything about the script is just bad. It goes from one absolutely preposterous, intelligence-insulting situation to the next. For example, how does one infected person manage to track the group through most of London completely undetected? Secondly, is it just me, or is it absolutely ludicrous to think that characters can survive being completely enveloped in nerve gas by just pulling their shirts over their noses? Since when is nerve gas equal to a fart? And thirdly, being infected yet not showing symptoms because your eyes are two different colors makes no sense at all. And get this: the movie completely steals a sequence from Grindhouse. There's a bit in the Planet Terror half of Grindhouse where a helicopter leans forward and chops up a whole platoon of zombies. And guess what? 28 Weeks Later does the exact same thing. I hope Robert Rodriguez sees the movie and sues the production team back to the Stone Age for ripping him off.

Another problem is that I just didn't care about the characters at all. The movie never gave me a reason to. By the halfway point, I was hoping that all the characters would be killed just so the movie would be over and I could go home. The cast obviously doesn't care, as all of them are phoning in their performances. The wardrobe department might as well have issued everyone T-shirts that said "Just Collecting A Paycheck."

Everyone involved with this abortion of a movie should be ashamed of themselves. If I were Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, I'd track down and violently assault the cast and crew for daring to sully the good name of 28 Days Later with this garbage. You know your movie is awful when the best part of it is the trailers that play before it. (FYI, we got the trailers for Resident Evil: Extinction, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and Live Free or Die Hard. I'm sure all of them will be better than this movie.)

I'm just going to tell you all right now that if you want to see 28 Weeks Later, you should either wait until the movie is in a second-run cheap theater or simply download it online and watch it for free. That way, you won't be wasting too much money on this. I'm giving it two stars, and let us never speak of it again. Well, let us not speak of it until September or so, so I can tear the movie a new one when I give it a full S@TM review.

I've got plans to see Shrek 3 next weekend and Pirates of the Caribbean 3 the weekend after that, so hopefully those will be better than this. And I'm hoping that I'll get at least a chance to see Bug too, because that looks awesome.