It’s rare for the fourth instalment in a franchise to be the best film in it, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “But that’s how things stand with the chequered ‘28 Days Later’ series.” In this “exciting” chapter – written, like all its predecessors, by Alex Garland – the plot picks up where the last film left off, with Britain long-since overwhelmed by a pandemic that has turned most of its population into zombies.
Twelve-year-old survivor Spike (Alfie Williams) is taken in by a “murderous Clockwork-Orangey gang of non-infected people” who call themselves “Jimmies”, and whose tracksuits and blond wigs are modelled, somewhat unexpectedly, on Jimmy Savile. Meanwhile, a doctor played by Ralph Fiennes, who lives in “an ossuary-monument” to those killed in the pandemic, is inching ever closer to a cure for the zombie virus. It all makes for a “forthright, energised” film in which “there is real human jeopardy and conflict” and, be warned, serious gore.
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