28 days later…

Directed by Danny Boyle, 28 days later… follows a bike courier (Cillian Murphy’s Jim) as he wakes up from a lengthy coma and must subsequently traverse an apocalyptic landscape overrun with bloodthirsty infected. It’s stirring subject matter that is, at the outset, employed to engrossing and thoroughly promising effect by Boyle, as the filmmaker, armed with Alex Garland’s script, kicks the proceedings off with a compelling opening that effective establishes Murphy’s character and the eerie, empty London streets on which he finds himself – with the almost inherently captivating bent of this stretch compensating for Anthony Dod Mantle’s distractingly low-rent and ugly digital cinematography. The lackluster visuals, however, become more and more distracting as 28 days later… progresses into its underwhelming and increasingly tedious midsection and second half, and it’s clear, certainly, that the picture’s third act, revolving around the protagonists’ encounter with evil soldiers, is just about as tiresome and interminable as one could possibly have envisioned – which does, in the end, cement the movie’s place as a missed opportunity of fairly epic proportions.

*1/2 out of ****