Ray Pride

Sleek, stripped down and mean as they come, "28 Weeks Later," Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's sequel to Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later," is a grim, sincerely nihilist, urgently political, wholly contemporary parable about life in wartime, more Goya than GOP. (The word "Iraq" has entered the conversation.) Coincidences and plot conveniences are rife, but the fury of action and the undeniable thematic intent surge forward. Most of this relentless horror movie takes place post-apocalypse, after the unthinkable is already splattered across your face, on the island portion of London's Canary Wharf development. The deserted city streets are often shown in sweeping, geometrically pleasing aerial shots while street-level, it's the grainy, jumpy long-lens style of "28 Days Later." In the next eighty minutes or so, after a couple of apocalypses and sustained genocide, are several primal scenes of familial investment--a Tony Scott-like phalanx of CCTV screens watching the world's most surveilled cities that eventually show plasma walls of flame until cameras lenses themselves melt and darkness is all; blood geysers and compounded viscera; a "Blair Witch" passage, and we arrive at an utterly classic final image. But the most impressive passage is the profoundly upsetting central set piece, which begins with a soldier's cry, "Aw man, this is FUBAR," and hurts like hell. Self-protection by American peacekeepers leads to a vivid and explicit depiction of a willful, wanton massacre by Army snipers above a city plaza. Just like a walk through a "normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime," to borrow a page from Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN). (There is a zombie harvest by helicopter rotor, the viscid slaughter of which is an operatic embellishment on Martin Scorsese's 1967 Vietnam War allegory, "The Big Shave.") There's some intrigue or fluency in almost every shot: my favorite is a slow wipe left across the screen when a major character realizes all hell has broken loose. With Rose Byrne, Robert Carlyle, Catherine McCormack, Harold Perrineau, Jeremy Renner. 91m.

"28 Weeks Later" breaks out Friday.=

(2007-05-08)

Also by Ray Pride

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Rushing on a sunny Thursday noon across Lake Street to a destination five blocks and ten, twelve minutes away, I want to grab something to eat during the movie screening to come; the first stop's a White Hen, where the prices are high, the readymade sandwiches are gone and a few dozen cases of beer re-stacked high block the drinks aisle
(2007-05-07)

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The latest entry is a flurry of action and character set pieces, not as fully realized as the post-adolescent furies in "Spider-Man 2," but with a dogged determination to give you your two-hours-and-twenty-minutes worth, with a riot of tones, including interludes reminiscent of "Saturday Night Fever" and the Three Stooges, along with the barrage of restless action and a surfeit of weeping characters--everyone seems to cry copiously at least twice
(2007-05-01)

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