Rob James in Total Film says it’s “a frantic follow-up” that delivers “jolts, claret and just enough character to make you care.”

As the title suggests, the film is set 28 weeks after the outbreak of the Zombie virus, and “takes place in a post-plague London that’s gone to the dogs – the Isle of Dogs,” explains James. “That’s where the US military has broken the quarantine as 15,000 civilians begin to rebuild their lives in the shadow of Canary Wharf (strangely, there’s no mention of the British armed forces; perhaps they’re too busy selling their zombie stories to The Sun). Among the civvies are Don (Robert Carlyle) and his kids Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) and Tammy (Imogen Poots). But when Don’s supposedly dead missus is found alive and (not very) well, another outbreak of Rage is on the cards.”

James found “moments here that beckon nightmares: the puking, raging Infected remain terrifyingly implacable beserkers; empty London landmarks (Regents Park, The Millennium Bridge, Wembley Stadium) are eerily strange yet familiar; and the opening ten minutes – all handheld cameras and chaotic self-preservation as the Infected attack a rural farmhouse – deserves props as one of the most disturbingly intense sequences you’ll see this year.”

“Basically, we're all f**ked and there's no hope,” deduces the delightfully named Jeremiah Kipp in Slant Magazine. “28 Days Later was a tough and uncompromising horror film, but it's all sunshine and laughter in comparison to the sequel”, which “rolls in like a poisonous dust cloud of nihilism”.

Background

• 28 Weeks Later

• Basically, there's no hope

• I spy with my rabid eye...

• 28 Days Later review

A wee bit of Method to his madness

He played a psycho in Trainspotting. Now he’s a zombie. Robert Carlyle is a seriously crazy guy

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

“The thesis of this film,” argues Kipp, “is that the War on Terror is ultimately a self-destructive one for all concerned, from the bullying authority figures to the demoralized combat soldiers to the fractured family units. Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo seems to place his empathy with the recently infected. Much like Philip Kaufman's remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, there's an understanding for what it means to be human—and the magic that is lost when that humanity is stripped away.”

In Village Voice, Nathan Lee, who, by the way, thought 28 Weeks Later “kicks ass”, muses that “on the one hand, 28 Weeks Later is a fable of the reconstruction; it might have been called Nation-building of the Damned. On the other hand, so what? As an exercise in pop politics, Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake cut deeper by replacing the crypto-socialist survival impulse of Romero's original with a total capitulation to cynical, self-serving individualism. That's far more trenchant than Fresnadillo's foreign-policy attack in part because Snyder, a political dunce (cf. 300), wasn't reflecting on ideology from the outside so much as illustrating it from within. Where 28 Weeks Later is allegorical, Snyder's Dawn was frightfully symptomatic.”

Derek Elley in Variety observed that it’s certainly a “classy makeover” for a “potentially endless franchise”.

“The pic wraps a tight-as-a-drum script around a cheeky metaphor for contempo Iraq, with razzle-dazzle dividends. Given the muscular playoff, starting May 11 worldwide, this bleak, tough chiller could easily match the 2002 original's surprising $82 million worldwide gross if it can survive the challenge of getting caught in Spidey's slipstream.”

Over at the Latino Review, El Mayimbe notes that 28 Weeks Later “seems to be a Latino affair since the director, writers and DP (Enrique Chediak) are Latino.” And any thoughts on the film itself? Having read just the script, he thought it was “entertaining”, but, despite its Latino affiliations, boiled down to just “another group of people on the run from the sprinting zombie flick which we have seen a dozen times before with the infection delivery this time around being different than the first film."

Cole Smithy , who had certainly seen the film, wasn’t entertained in the slightest. “Audiences hoping to experience similar thrills to director Danny Boyle's original virus-infection shocker 28 Days Later would do better to re-watch that flawed film rather than endure this committee produced half-hearted follow-up from newbie writer/director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Intacto). It’s a cut-and-paste example of how movie sequels are predictably inferior to their ancestors. The movie doesn’t care about believability or cohesion. ‘You want a sequal – we’ve got a sequel,’ is the prevailing attitude here.”

The problem was also sequential for Lisa Schwarzbaum, in Entertainment Weekly. It had all been done before in the “startling, stylish, nihilistic, genre-crossing” 28 Days Later, thought Schwarzbaum, and this sequal just doesn’t bring enough of anything new to the party. “What's mine to ponder is the grim reality that a sequel, especially to a movie that once surprised, can never produce the same bite as the original. The genre twist is no longer so novel, the darkness of tone no longer so unnerving, the gaudy zombiedom no longer so tasty. Plus, we're missing the arresting hallucinatory stare of Cillian Murphy as the original zombiepocalypse survivor.”

She did liked all the eerily silent bits though. “28 Weeks Later excels at creating a keen, creepy sense of a civilization stopped dead in its tracks — vaporized, almost, except for those disemboweled bodies left still undisposed. Fresnadillo (director of the cool 2002 Spanish thriller Intacto) and his screenwriting team have a good feeling for big-city emptiness — famous London landmarks that might just as well be rubble, so ghostly do they look. But the filmmakers also appreciate what it feels like to be living day to day in limbo, as if with the mute button on.”

Kim Newman in Empire brushes away concerns about its sequel status, and gives the film four stars. “This sequel extends the story in intelligent, suspenseful ways. Simply because it’s a ‘part two’, it isn’t as fresh, but enough changes are rung to stop it feeling like a remake. Like Aliens, it ups the action scale by bringing in Yanks with big guns, which — as George Romero has often shown — means even more peril for ordinary folks caught between plague and the authorities.

“The set-pieces “escalate with mostly excellent results: watching it all go wrong for the military — and their desperate response — is harrowing, but the tonal shift in a scene involving a helicopter and the infected on a heath which strays into Peter Jackson/Sam Raimi comic-horror territory is less effective. Momentum is regained, though, for a strong, dark finish.”

The overal result is “bigger action, more amazing deserted (and devastated) London sequences and biting contemporary relevance, if a touch less heart than the original."

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