It’s hard to imagine two British directors with, artistically speaking, so little in common as Danny Boyle and Roger Michell. Boyle made his name with Trainspotting, Michell with Notting Hill. Boyle’s latest, 28 Days Later, is a low-budget, star-free zombie horror story, shot on digital video and set in a future Britain. Michell’s Changing Lanes is a contemporary urban American drama and stars Ben Affleck and Samuel L Jackson. Yet — surprisingly — both are gripping moral parables with a common theme.

28 Days Later opens inside a primate research centre. Threeanimal liberationists have broken in and are wandering through a dark lab full of caged and enraged chimps. They find one poor creature wired up to a bank of television screens. He’s being drip-fed images of human violence: mobs on the rampage, police attacking demonstrators. A scientist stumbles in and begs the intruders not to release the chimps from their cages — they’ve been infected, he says. “With what?” one of the liberationists asks. “Rage,” comes the ominous reply. Oops, too late. Monkey bites man. Infected man bites man. And 28 days later, Britain is a nation of corpses, collapsed public services and enraged zombie-like creatures — which cynics might think is a pretty apt metaphor for our times. To this new world awakes our handsome hero, Jim (Cillian Murphy), from a coma in a hospital bed. He walks the deserted streets of London until rescued from an assault by “the infected” by two survivors, Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley).

Boyle’s film, with a screenplay by Alex Garland, echoes every zombie and Day of the Triffids-style film you’ve ever seen. He has been keen to make it a distinctly British affair, filling the screen with national symbols like Big Ben and black cabs, but it has a stylistic grit and exuberant gore that’s usually missing from the zombie genre. And these zombies are your worst nightmare: they’re not the kind that plod along like sleepwalkers. They can run like pumas and puke blood in your face. There are plenty of moments when your heart leaps in your mouth and your bottom leaves your seat — or should that be the other way around? You breathe a sigh of relief when it’s all over.

The central weakness of the film is the characters; they don’t have much in the way of personality, and none of the cast has a powerful screen presence. Even Christopher Eccleston, as an army officer, seems muted.

Over in Changing Lanes, Gavin Banek (Affleck) and Doyle Gipson (Jackson) are also about to experience the horrors of rage. Banek, once a young man of principle, has become a yuppie primate practising law in the corporate jungle that is Wall Street. Gipson, a sincere insurance salesman, is a recovering alcoholic on the brink of getting his life — and family — back together. One day, they come crashing into each other’s lives.

Their duel begins with a minor incident on a highway when both are hurrying to court. Banek leaves Gipson stranded in the rain, and Gipson misses a crucial court appearance involving access to his two sons. Then Banek has to retrieve a crucial court file from Gipson; if he doesn’t, it’s goodbye to the job, the good life, the yacht and the wife, and hello to a prison sentence. When Gipson refuses to give back the file, Banek decides to play hardball, hiring a computer hacker (played with an infectious malice by Dylan Baker) to destroy Gipson’s credit rating and declare him bankrupt. Now both men are stuck in a struggle for survival, and a dramatic series of tit-for-tat attacks follows.

Changing Lanes is a powerful, engaging and intelligent moral drama, rooted in ordinary life and in real emotions we can all relate to. What Michell catches so well is the tension of urban life. We see Jackson and Affleck struggling not to lose it, men on the brink of becoming monsters. Both give terrific performances. For once, Jackson can’t cruise along being the cool dude. Here he’s in Michael Douglas, ordinary-guy mode, and it works wonderfully.





28 Days Later, 18, 113 mins, Two stars

Changing Lanes, 15, 99 mins, Three stars